Tidings of Great Boys (14 page)

Of course she would. She’s a math geek.

“Come on, then,” I urged them. If I didn’t watch them, they’d talk all afternoon about walking and never actually do it. “Boots
and coats. If you don’t have them, we probably have something that will fit you.”

I should have known that a girl who traveled with two suitcases the size of trunks (“They’re only fifty pounds each, Mac—I
weighed them”) would have not only a coat suitable for a Scottish typhoon, but the boots to go with it. Alasdair, unfortunately,
had come with a small weekender and not much else.

“Here, take one of Dad’s jumpers, and he’s got a duffel coat here somewhere—ah, here it is.” I pulled both items, smelling
faintly of dogs and wool, off pegs in Dad’s office. I measured Alasdair’s feet with one eye and picked a pair of boots from
the jumble on the mudroom floor. “These should work.”

He pulled everything on and actually managed to look both debonair and comfortable. I
am
destined to be a perfect hostess.

“Thank you, Lady Lindsay.”

“
Please
call me Mac. All my friends do.”

“Mac, then. Though Lindsay suits you better.”

“It does?” I thought it sounded a bit like medicine. If people hadn’t started calling me Mac when I was little, I’d have chosen
to go by Eithne, though that would have presented its own set of problems in London, where they don’t know how to pronounce
it. Having to explain, “It’s Enya. E-i-t-h-n-e” fifty million times would get tiresome. Mac is much simpler.

“Lindsay.” He drew out the two mundane syllables. “‘Where the linden trees grow.’ How can you not want to own up to that?”

How did he know this stuff? “All right,” I said as I held the door for him and Gillian to walk outside into the kitchen garden.
“You may call me Lindsay if you must. I would by no means suspend any pleasure of yours.”

“So you quote Jane Austen to men you barely know.” One eyebrow raised, he opened the gate in the wall, where two sets of booted
feet had already trampled the snow. “That could be dangerous.”

“Depends on the man,” I said airily. “If he doesn’t have a clue, no harm done—he thinks I’m eccentric. If he does, I know
he has a brain and we have something in common. So it’s a win-win for me.”

“You could always just ask him,” Gillian said from behind us. “Don’t you think it’s manipulative otherwise?”

I moved to one side so the three of us could walk abreast down the snowy expanse of the lawn toward the park. “I haven’t controlled
him, so how can it be manipulative?” I asked her. “It’s like a test.”

“But if he doesn’t know about it, how can he try to succeed?”

“If he wants to succeed, he’ll find some other way,” Alasdair suggested.

“You two are making more of this than it deserves. It was just a joke. And Alasdair got it.”

“And if it makes you feel better, I don’t feel manipulated,” he assured Gillian. “Whoops! Take care.” He grabbed her arm as
she lost her footing in the snow.

“Thanks. Too much thinking, not enough paying attention.” She set off again, but she wasn’t done with whatever was on her
mind. “You have to admit, Mac, you have a talent for it.”

“For what?”

“Manipulation. You got your mom here, and Lissa was one hundred percent convinced she wouldn’t come.” Alasdair gave me a sharp
glance.

What was with her? Plain speaking was one thing. Pointing out the defects in my character in front of Alasdair was quite another.

“You forget I know my mother.” I kept my tone light. “She may not have been here in years, but I knew she wouldn’t be able
to resist my having a house party and possibly bungling it.”

“What would it be to her?” Alasdair asked, after a small hesitation. “Not that I’m minding your business or anything.”

I shrugged. “No secrets among friends, right? I think the divorce was a mistake. My parents belong together. They’re just
too proud to admit it. So I made a complete bother of myself with Mummy until she gave in and came up here in a howling gale
on Christmas Eve, on the train, to help me out.”

“See?” Gillian gave Alasdair an I-told-you-so look. “The manip-meister.”

“I don’t know.” He moved to the front to brush branches out of our way. We made better time under the trees, where the snow
wasn’t able to reach the ground. “Your heart’s in the right place, and I think that’s the main thing.”

My nose might be nipped with cold, and my hands jammed into my coat pockets as far as they would go, but his smile warmed
me from the inside out.

“What would you have done?” I asked Gillian. “In my place, I mean.”

“Been honest.” Most of the time I like her bluntness, but sometimes it scrapes a little too close to the bone. “Told them
how I felt, and asked them both to the next school event I had, so they’d be there together. Or something.”

“And what if they told you to mind your own business?” Never mind that my school events lately had been on a different continent.

“I’d still be honest. At least they’d know how I felt and what I thought about their relationship. After that, what they felt
and thought would be up to them.”

We walked out from under the trees, and the wind off the sea caught us sideways. The hem of my coat blew out, and Gillian
grabbed the ends of her muffler before it unwound from her neck.

“If I said something like that to my dad,” I shouted against the wind, “he’d curl up like a snail and hide in his shell. As
it is—”

“Said something like what?” My mother and Patricia walked up behind us and I realized with a jolt that the treacherous wind
had blown my words straight to her.

“Said something like, Why don’t you wear a jumper in brighter colors?” Alasdair turned to her, smiling, and held open his
coat so she could see he was wearing her ex-husband’s sweater. “I don’t know. I think this one suits both of us.”

Mummy laughed and buttoned him up as if he were six years old. “You’re quite right. Graham would no more be caught out in
a red jumper than I’d wear an avocado mask in public.”

“Or I,” Patricia said.

“Or me,” Gillian added. “Though I think I’m going to need a complete facial after this walk. Wow, what a wind.”

“But look at the view.” Mummy’s outstretched arm took in the whole slope of the
strath
, the wide river valley for which our land was named, to the wild coast as far as the rocks in the distance. “Out there past
the horizon is Denmark, and south of us across the valley, that stone pile you can see on the hill was a sailors’ chapel hundreds
of years ago.”

I blinked at her. “It was? How do you know?”

“Daddy told me. We used to ramble all over these rocks and hills when we were first married.”

“Funny the things that stick with you.” Patricia distracted her, giving me time to arrange my expression into daughterly interest.
Inside, I wanted to jump up and down, shaking Gillian’s arm and shouting, “See? It’s working already. She’s thinking about
when they were married and happy!”

But I didn’t. Instead, I listened to Patricia say, “You should really talk to Graham about it, Meg. You can get grants from
places like the Society for Self Sustaining Estates, and once you’re on the Hand Picked Hotels list and the American registries,
you have it made.”

“Have what made?” What was she talking about? Self sustaining estates?

“This place is one of the most wonderfully preserved historic castles I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen plenty,” Patricia said.
Her gray gaze was steady on mine. “I’ve been telling your mom that it would be a shame to risk losing it when you’re sitting
on a gold mine. You could make the castle into an upscale guest hotel with a little work, and it would start paying for itself
in no time.”

Losing it? Paying for itself? My brain howled in a vacuum of insufficient information. “What?”

“Patricia, I haven’t told her. This isn’t the time,” Mummy murmured, but now the wind did me the favor and blew her quiet
words straight to me. Luckily, Alasdair and Gillian had wandered to the lip of the hill, where he was pointing out the distant
view of crashing waves to her.

“What do you mean, losing it? Losing Strathcairn? What are you talking about?”

My mother’s face turned white, and the wind stabbed through my coat, as sudden as fear.

I
’M NOT GOING to spoil your Christmas by talking about it.”

Mummy fussed with her suitcase, hanging and rehanging things in the tiny guest-room closet while I sat on the bed. She looked
about as at home in this room as her vintage Catherine Walker gown looked hanging on the back of the chipped cupboard door.
Both of them belonged in the earl’s suite, with its magnificent walk-in closet and carefully bagged dresses.

But that was a discussion for another time. Right now I had to find out exactly what Patricia Sutter was up to—and why.

“Too late,” I said. “It’s going to bother me every minute until you tell me what’s going on.”

“Lindsay,” she said in measured tones, “it’s nothing you need to worry about.”

Honestly
. “Mummy, I’m seventeen. You and I both know I’m not a child anymore. If something is going on at Strathcairn, I deserve to
know about it. Maybe I can help.”

A laugh jerked loose through her tightly held control. “I hardly think so. Though scaling back the spending would be a start.”

“Are we running out of money?”

She sighed, and her shoulders slumped, as if she were deflating.

“That’s it, isn’t it?” I felt bad for pressing her, but I had to know. “Something’s happened to our money.”

“Nothing more than has happened to everyone. Our income is based on capital and investments. What we live on has shrunk because…
oh, the economic times and changing prices on the stock market and all those tiresome details that I never used to think about.
But now I’m forced to think about them. My advisors insist that I make some decisions to get us through this.”

As Gillian would say, all the neurons in my brain lined up and fired at once. “That’s why you’re here, isn’t it? It’s not
to help me put together the party—it’s to talk with Dad about what’s to be done.”

“Of course I’m here for your party.”

“But that isn’t all.”

“No.”

“What does Dad say?”

She looked away, out the window over the trees of the park. Since we were on the third floor, she could see quite a distance.
“He doesn’t know. Because… darling, this is difficult for me to admit, so I’ll just say it. When we divorced, part of the
settlement was that the money I’d been contributing toward the upkeep of Strathcairn would continue until I remarried.”

I sucked in a breath. “You’re not—are you—”

“No, no, of course not.” She crossed the room to sit beside me, and gave me a quick hug. “If anyone would know about such
a thing, you would.”

“I’ve been gone since September.”

“I have no doubt your endless social resources would have informed you. But what I was saying is that, with the capital shrinking,
the percentage of my income going to Strathcairn has been reduced, too. Which is why the film people working here last year
were such a godsend. Dad was able to keep afloat for another year, just because of the location fees they paid him.”

“But now that year is almost over.”

“And things are not looking good.”

“Dad would never sell this place. Never.” I couldn’t wrap my brain round such a possibility. Our family had always been here.
For my dad to sell up and move into an Edinburgh suburb was unthinkable. Where would he put the chickens, for one thing? And
how would he live without his experimentations in the cellar, or his rambles over the hills with the dogs, or any of the things
that both of us loved to do? Where would my horses go? Where would I go, for that matter? “It’s completely impossible.”

“It’s not. That’s the sad thing. That’s also the unhappy news I have to break to him.”

Now what Patricia had been saying all made sense. “You have to talk him into this self-sustaining plan. Turn this into a working
estate again, and we can get through the economic downturn thing.”

She ran a manicured hand over one cheek, and pushed her hair behind one ear. “Daddy isn’t exactly good at playing lord of
the manor. Patricia has some good ideas, but the very thought of strange people overrunning the place would make him shriek
and hide in the basement. You know it would.”

“But he’s a good host. Look at him today. A bunch of strange people
are
overrunning the place, and he was in the kitchen gassing away with half of them.”

“There’s a difference between family guests you’ve invited and paying guests inviting themselves.”

“Yeah. About three hundred pounds a night.”

She smiled, a sad, rueful smile. “We could only hope.”

“Do you want me to talk to him?”

“I can’t involve you in this, darling. This is for your father and me to work out.”

“How can you work it out when you haven’t actually spent any time with him in years?”

“We have a very civil relationship, as I hope you’ve observed. There’s no need for dramatics.”

“Yes, but how do you even start a conversation like that?
Graham, we’re going to lose Strathcairn and four hundred years of your family’s history unless you turn it into a hotel
.” I mimicked my mother’s plummy Belgravia tones. “That will go over well.”

“I’ll think of something.”

“You could start with your feelings for him.” The words leaped out of my mouth and into the space between us with no warning
at all, and hung there, waiting, while Mummy stared at me.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Oh, don’t give me your countess face, Mummy. You’ve seen the way he looks at you. If you haven’t, I have some video to show
you.”

“You’re being ridiculous.”

“I think that’s the third reason you braved the trains and a snowstorm to come up here.”

“
I
think you’re imagining things.” She got up and returned to her empty suitcase. With nothing left to do, she began to zip
up the exterior pockets. The zippers made tiny screeching sounds in the silence.