Once Upon a Tower

Page 56

“Why are you telling me this?” Gowan asked, walking into his study and turning about.
“You wish to hear details of all significant appointments in the household,” Bardolph said, his mouth tightening into a pucker that looked like a potato’s eye.
“Inform Her Grace of his credentials,” Gowan said. Then he remembered that Edie would wish to practice rather than listen to Bardolph. “Never mind, just get the man here as soon as possible.”
“He’s already here,” Bardolph said, “in the capacity of Miss Susannah’s tutor.”
After luncheon Gowan retreated back to his study and was working well, having managed to push Edie from his mind, when she poked her face around the door. Her hair was curling around her face and the sun coming in the windows lit a strand as brilliantly as gleaming gold. “There you are!” she cried. “I’ve been touring the castle with Mrs. Grisle. Layla, Susannah, and I are about to walk down and see the river. Will you join us?”
The moment he saw her, his body sprang to attention. “Of course,” he said, standing and pulling his coat down in front.
“Would you mind if Susannah left off her blacks after today?” Edie asked as they made their way through the castle’s maze of rooms, all connected to each other rather than to a corridor.
“Not at all.”
“I see that you yourself are not observing that custom.”
Gowan glanced at Edie and then looked away, shocked by his reaction to a mere glimpse of her rosy lips. “I made a decision not to wear mourning for my mother,” he said, pulling himself together.
“I suggest that we view Susannah’s three months of mourning garments as sufficient.”
He nodded, not trusting himself to speak. Even thinking about his mother made the inarticulate feelings of anger and possession in him gather force. The last thing he needed was to crack apart. Somehow he had to make Edie understand that the mere mention of the late duchess felt as if a torch had fallen on kindling.
They made their way to the entry hall to find Layla standing in the middle of the cavernous space, holding Susannah’s wrists tightly and spinning as she swung his sister around and around. Susannah’s legs were parallel to the ground, her skirts billowing. And her red hair was flying around her shoulders in a tangled cloud.
Needless to say, she was shrieking with pure joy. Layla was laughing, too, and so were the six footmen ranged along the walls, though their mouths snapped shut when they saw Gowan.
It appeared that Layla had managed a miracle, and in no time at all: she’d won over his half sister. As Layla brought her gently back to the floor, he saw that Susannah’s peaked little face, ordinarily pallid, was flushed with color and her eyes were radiant. It made him feel guilty.
Susannah had not noticed their arrival; she was hanging on Layla’s hand and demanding to be swung again. Gowan strode forward. “I must be back at work shortly; we shouldn’t delay.” Two footmen sprang to attention, pulling open the great doors.
“What do you know about the tower?” Edie asked as they walked through the courtyard toward the open portcullis in the wall. Her voice was utterly calm; she hadn’t responded to his irritability at all. He didn’t know what to make of that.
“It’s a freestanding tower, much older than the castle we live in,” he said.
Susannah ran past them, her thin legs scissoring like a black-legged sandpiper, if such a creature existed. I should have visited the nursery more often, Gowan told himself. I should have put it on my list, made it a priority.
They took the long, gently sloping path that led down and around the side of the hill on which the castle stood. “The tower is likely all that remains of a castle that stood there in the thirteenth century. If so, it would have been the castle keep.” They rounded the hill. “Over the years it’s gained a reputation for being unclimbable among some of the more foolish local people.”
“And Susannah says there are ghosts?” Layla prompted.
Gowan snorted. “Bollocks. Three fools climbed the tower in order to impress their ladies, only to fall to their deaths. I fail to see why their failures should cause them to recur as apparitions. Needless to say, I’ve never seen any ghosts.”
Below them flowed the Glaschorrie, placidly making its way through the fertile land of the Kinross estate and then out to the Atlantic, far in the distance.
“It’s rare to have a plain of this sort in Scotland, isn’t it?” Edie asked, looking over the fields of wheat.
“It is. That’s probably exactly why an ancestor built a castle, or at least a tower, here on the river. He wanted to protect what was his.”
“It must have a lovely view.”
“He was a fool,” Gowan said with a shrug, “because the plain floods every spring and often in between. The Glaschorrie becomes a raging torrent heading downhill all way from here to the sea.”
“Yet the tower has survived.”
He nodded. “Flood and fire both.”
They had walked far enough that they entered the orchards that lay around the base of the tower. Layla and Susannah now trailed them, walking hand in hand and pausing now and then to look at a butterfly or an interesting stone in the path.
“Aren’t these trees injured when the river overflows?”
Gowan reached out and pinched a leaf from an apple tree. “They seem to manage. Once, when I was young, I remember looking down from the castle and seeing only the smallest branches above the water. A day later all that water was gone, drained off to the ocean.”
“It sounds ferocious.”
“We’ve lost men to this river, though I’ve put in place evacuation orders. Last year we lost only three goats, and that was due to a fool of a tenant who thought it would be enough to put the animals on the second floor of his house.”
“It wasn’t?”
Gowan shook his head. “The flood took the house, and the goats with it. The land here is so flat that when the Glaschorrie rages, she often cuts a new route for herself. What is safe one year is no longer safe the next.”
Edie walked beside him silently; he couldn’t tell what she was thinking. They reached the broad base of the tower, into which was set a small but very stout oaken door, and Gowan pulled the great iron key from his coat pocket. After he’d set workers swarming over it for months, the stonework and mortar looked as good as new.
When he opened the door, they were met by the sultry sweet odor of ripe apples. Up above were the attics, where the apple harvest was stored every autumn, allowing his household to enjoy apples all year round.
Gowan pushed the door all the way open, stooped a bit in order to pass under the lintel, and entered the small dark room at the tower’s base. He took a quick look around, making certain all was well before stepping back so Edie could enter. Susannah slipped past and began trotting up the narrow uneven stairs, her black skirts disappearing around the corner.
“I am not fond of small spaces,” Layla said, hovering on the threshold.
“The upper floors are far more commodious,” he told her.
Layla started to climb the stone steps but Gowan caught Edie’s arm, holding her until her stepmother turned the corner.
He looked down into her face, and the yawning chasm in his chest cracked open a little wider. Edie was so beautiful. She was everything he’d thought on the very first night he met her—an ethereal, glowing creature who danced to music only she could hear—but she was also a musician, a prodigy, a woman whose musical ability would have had the world at her feet, had she been born a man.