Swept off Her Feet (6 page)

Robert and I stared at each other. I knew I was blushing—the heat from my cheeks was the only warm part of my whole body.

He took a step backward.

“Oh, my God,” he said. “I’m so sorry, it was the coat—I’ve never seen a coat like that anywhere else, and I thought . . .” He squinted at me. “I assume Alice
is
your sister?”

“Yes, she is! Happens all the time, honestly, don’t worry about it,” I babbled. “Quite a compliment, actually! Ha-ha! Sure it wouldn’t go down as well the other way round. . . .”

Catriona stared at me as if I were talking Welsh, then gave Robert one of those
Don’t make me say it
frowns Mum flashed at Dad when he tried to buy full-fat milk instead of skim in Waitrose.

“You can’t just slope off when you’re the host, Robbie.” She turned back to me with a smile only slightly warmer than the wintry air. “Lovely to meet you, Alice, or Evie. But I have to drag Robert off, I’m afraid. We hadn’t finished discussing what he’s wearing to the ball!”

“Yes, we had.” Robert raised his hands. “I thought I’d made it clear. No kilt. No sporran. Sorry. But no.”

Her eyes narrowed.

His eyes narrowed.

Five excruciating seconds passed, during which I was literally frozen to the spot. I was about to make some random comment just to break the tension and get myself inside to thaw out, when Catriona grimaced and swung her braid like a scorpion’s tail.

“You’re tired. So am I. We’ll talk tomorrow.
Good night
.”

She beeped a Range Rover open, threw the obedient Jack Russell in, then leaped in herself, showing a lot of green leg. With a roar of the engine, she backed round, nearly clipping Max’s car, and set off down the drive in a squirt of gravel.

Robert and I were left staring at her vanishing taillights.

After a moment, he turned back to me and held out his hand. “Shall we start again? Robert McAndrew. Friend of Fraser’s. And Alice’s.”

“Hello,” I said. “Evie Nicholson. Sister of Alice. Friend of Fraser. Hello.”

Stop saying hello,
I told myself. But my brain had gone into slow motion, to save energy for the butterflies careering around my stomach. Good-looking man, glamorous castle, freezing cold, fancy dress ball—I didn’t know what to focus on first.

Besides, it felt a bit awkward to go back to shaking hands after I’d been so recently pressed up against the soft bit of his neck.

I wondered if Robert was feeling as jangly as I was, but he didn’t show any outward signs of it. In fact, he was moving straight into polite chitchat, as if the hug, the spat, and the sudden departure hadn’t happened.

“Are you here to Simplify us?” he inquired. “I’m not surprised
Alice sent reinforcements ahead. I think the junk in this place would defeat even her fearsome skills.”

“Oh, it’s not
junk
,” I began. Max’s clientele were always so self-deprecating about “tatty old rugs” used to line dog baskets, which then turned out to be priceless Persian treasures.

“
Junk
’s maybe too strong a word,” he agreed. “How about . . .
museum-quality bric-a-brac
?”

“Robert? Robert, are you out there?” hissed a woman’s voice before I could retract my dropped jaw. The voice sounded as if it were coming from deep, deep inside a well of despair, but in fact it was coming from the porch. “Janet’s
asking
for you! And I need
help
! Your dad’s about to offer everyone the carrot schnapps!”

I spun round and saw a small woman peering out into the darkness. The light above her head was turning her silvery blond hair into a halo of frizz, and she was wearing a sequined cardigan with dangling bell sleeves that she kept shoving nervously up to her elbows. It looked too big for her, as did the majestic porch itself.

I rushed over to the source of heat. “Evie Nicholson,” I said, shaking her tiny hand. “Is it Ingrid? I’ve come to value your antiques. I’m so sorry I’m late. I didn’t realize you were having a party.”

“Oh, we’re not! I mean, I didn’t realize we
were
until they started arriving just as I was putting some tea on. . . .” She shoved the sleeves up and they slid down her arms almost immediately. Underneath the glitz was a rather Sunday-night T-shirt.

If I was being brutally honest, she wasn’t
quite
what I’d pictured as the chatelaine of a house like this. I’d been thinking more . . . Princess Margaret crossed with Helen Mirren. With some tartan.

Suddenly she pulled herself together and gave me a sweet, if deranged, smile. “Sorry, come on in. You must be frozen!”

As she spoke, a man hove into view behind her, and he was much more what I’d been expecting. He was sporting a pair of red tartan trousers, a pink golf sweater, and a tie adorned with golden stags’ heads. The comedy Scotsman look was accessorized with a large crystal tumbler of some orange liquid, and a shock of pale red hair that—I peered as discreetly as I could in the weak light—was either a very bad wig or just very unfortunate.

“What’s going on here?” he inquired with a genial beam. “Catriona with you? And that antisocial son of mine?”

“Evie, my husband, Duncan,” said Ingrid. Did I detect a touch of
froideur
, or were we all just freezing? “Duncan, this is Evie Nicholson. The antiques consultant.”

“Evie!” Duncan set his tumbler on a nearby stone eagle, and clasped my hand in both of his. I normally hated golf-club handshakes, but frankly I was grateful for any warmth I could get. “How marvelous. Do come in. Come in. . . .”

He started to usher me inside, then paused and peered over my shoulder. “You too, Robert. In. Now. Don’t go sloping off. You’ve been spotted. And there are people you need to talk to.”

Robert muttered something, but I wasn’t lingering outside to catch it.

By some impressive trick of Scottish architecture, it was almost colder in the entrance hall than it was outside. The huge fireplace, big enough to roast a horse in, lay empty apart from a stone jar stuffed with dried thistles, and the draft whistled a merry tune direct from the Russian steppes through the leaded
windows. The hall was stone-flagged, and littered with large oak chairs and hulking carved boxes that might have contained the remains of Jacobite rebels or spare cannonballs.

I could see glass display cases everywhere—ships in bottles, fossils, iridescent shells, barometers—and what wasn’t oak was hung with tapestries. My pulse quickened. The hall wasn’t breathtaking just because of the cold. It took my breath away because I could totally see ghosts of old McAndrew warriors and damsels floating through the panels in ancient kilts, trailing long tartan sashes and melancholy and
history
.

Not literally, but you know what I mean.

“We’ve just got a few people round for Sunday night drinkies,” Duncan went on, sweeping me, suitcase in tow, through a section of hall bedecked with disembodied antlers and medieval weaponry as far as the eye could see. “Hope you don’t mind. Bit of a local tradition. Well, a new tradition. One we’ve started!”

“Let me take your coat, Evie,” said Ingrid heavily.

“Um, I might just hang on to it for a while,” I said, picturing the moment when I’d have to reveal my jeans to a drawing room full of cocktail party guests, probably all wearing bow ties and possibly toting cigarette holders. I racked my brains for the etiquette; were cocktails more or less formal than dinner?

It didn’t help that my eyes kept flitting from the amazing tattered old Scottish flag hanging over the balcony to the lamp in the shape of a giant brass fish to a huge emerald witch ball suspended above the balustrade.

“If it’s not too rude,” I went on, dragging my attention back to the matter at hand, “maybe I should go and freshen up before I—”

Duncan grabbed my elbow and steered me toward a closed door. “No, what you need is a drink and a warm-up by the fire. Ingrid? Tell Mhairi to take Evie’s case up to the Gordon Suite.”

Ooh. The
Gordon Suite
.

I glowed at the thought of my case being whisked away by staff, just like in a Merchant Ivory film, until I remembered exactly how heavy it was. Not having spent much time in stately homes outside National Trust opening hours, I’d fallen back on my extensive knowledge of period dramas and packed for most eventualities, up to and including some impromptu shooting and light croquet.

As Ingrid went to take it from me, I stepped back protectively. I’d sat on it for hours to get that “traveling light” look.

“There’s no need,” I said. “I’ll take it up myself.”

“No, no!” said Duncan, and I remembered too late that you weren’t supposed to porter your own luggage in posh houses. I hoped I wasn’t being scored on this.

“Now, do come through. So many people are dying to meet you,” Duncan was saying, while Ingrid telegraphed something to an invisible maid over the top of his head.

“What do you mean, ‘so many people—’ ” I began, but he’d pushed open the door and shoved me inside (“Come on, come on, don’t let the heat out!”), slamming the door behind us, nearly trapping my heels in the process.

At once, conversation ceased as all eyes swung my way.

I blinked hard. There was a lot to take in.

Twenty or so guests were gathered in the green-and-maroon drawing room, most wearing tartan trousers or cashmere twinsets or, in a couple of cases, both. All were standing as close as they could to the big marble fireplace, in which
a modest basket of firewood was burning valiantly, and were clutching tiny sherry glasses.

A normal drinks party, in other words, give or take the palatial setting. But what really sent a shiver of ice down my spine were the other things most guests were clutching.

A carriage clock. A Clarice Cliff teapot. A violin case. And, in several cases, plastic supermarket carrier bags.

It was a drive-by valuation party. And I was trapped.

Some people have nightmares
about retaking their A-level school exams stark naked. I had a recurring nightmare about being forced to do on-the-spot valuations in front of a room full of expectant people clutching fake Lalique vases. The trouble was, unlike nude exams, it did sometimes happen in real life.

For me, a party wasn’t a party until someone demanded I value their earrings. Max warned me about it: as soon as you mentioned you worked in antiques, everyone was emptying their handbags to show you the silver Edwardian letter opener their granny gave them that they now used to counterattack muggers in Clapham.

I mean, it
could
be a great icebreaker, as Max himself proved time and again with many horse-riding ladies of a certain age; but the trouble was, unlike him, (a) I didn’t have the auction prices of every single item in the whole world at my fingertips, and (b) I wasn’t great at pretending I did.

Now, faced with a room full of guests, I took an involuntary step backward toward the door, but Duncan was already
pressing a lead-crystal glass of some liquid into my hand, and ushering a strange-looking man toward me.

“Here you go, Evie, chin-chin! Now, have you met Innes Stout? Innes, this is Evie Nicholson.”

Innes looked like the kind of man who spent a lot of time in the open air, “tending” to vermin. He wore an army-surplus sweater under a tweed jacket, and a tie. At least he wasn’t wielding an Arts and Crafts barometer.

I extended the hand that wasn’t gripping my drink. “Hello, Innes.”

Innes responded by reaching into his jacket pocket and pulling out a flintlock pistol, causing the woman earwigging next to us to let out a loud shriek and stagger backward into a red velvet sofa.

Luckily for Innes, people were always pulling unexpected things out of their jackets at Max’s shop. I’d seen
much
worse. My grin fixed more rigidly on my face.

“Calm yourself, Sheila!” Duncan barked over my shoulder. “It’s only Innes’s dueling pistol! Gets it out all the time at the golf club! You
must
have seen it before.”

Ingrid appeared from nowhere and began tending to the winded Sheila, all the while shooting murderous glances at her husband.

I hoped she didn’t think I’d asked him to do that.

Meanwhile, Innes and Duncan were carrying on as if nothing had happened. “My great-great-great-great-grandfather shot four Englishmen wi’ this.” Innes proudly stroked the barrel. “Not at the same time, mind.” He looked at me as if I were going to run some kind of bar-code scanner over it and beep out a value. “D’you need to hold it?”

“Um, I won’t, thanks,” I stammered. “Four Englishmen, eh?”

“Aye,” said Innes. “All stone deed. I’ve a couple more at home. Not implicated in fatalities, mind.”

“Go on, it won’t bite,” urged Duncan. “Have a feel!”

What else was I meant to do? I could feel several pairs of eyes pretending not to look in our direction.

Gingerly I took the pistol from Innes. It was heavy, and I got an odd dark feeling from it.

I didn’t ever put it in so many words to Max because he would have laughed like a drain, but I had a bit of a sixth sense when it came to the history of the antiques I bought. Maybe it was my fertile imagination, overcompensating after growing up in a wipe-clean house full of brand-new furniture, but memories seemed to bubble into my head when I held old things, like the faint trace of perfume on a coat, or cigarette smoke in an old cocktail bag. I never bought repro at auctions, even when it was skillfully done; it never felt right in my hands.