Waterfall Glen (6 page)

The ceiling was dominated by a chandelier which wouldn’t have looked out of place in the ballroom of a grand hotel. It hung over a long table, which had at least thirty antique chairs around it. Their legs were elegantly bowed, their upholstery a plummy velvet. The far wall was taken up by a tall fireplace, above which hung a round leather shield crossed by two rusty old basket-hilted broadswords. Sunlight streamed through the deep-set windows in the long wall to the right, while the opposite wall was lined with oil portraits in ornate gilt frames.

One picture in particular caught Kate’s attention. It hung the wrong way around, so that only the blank canvas backing was on display.

“That’s Jamie’s picture,” Finlay said, following Kate’s gaze. “He was sent off to fight with Bonnie Prince Charlie in 1745 while his older brother stayed at home. Landed
families often hedged their bets and backed both sides in those days. Anyway, Charlie’s men were slaughtered at Culloden, a bleak moor not far from here. Jamie was spotted running away from the enemy, not at them, and was never seen again. The story goes that he was too ashamed to show his face in the glen. His portrait was turned to face the wall, and it’s hung that way ever since.”

“You mentioned a run of misfortune in the family—is the ‘curse’, or whatever you might want to call it, down to Jamie?”

Finlay shook his head. “Jamie brought shame on himself and disgrace to his family, but not the sort of bitter hatred that lies behind a curse.”

“If Jamie’s not to blame, then who is?”

Finlay moved on to the next painting and said, “Him …”

The portrait showed a weak-jawed man with shifty eyes and strands of ginger hair combed over a balding pate.

“And especially her.”

Kate looked at the man’s portrait with little more than passing interest, but caught her breath when she saw the picture hanging next to it. It showed a young woman with shoulder-length blond hair, cold blue bedroom eyes, and a seductive smile. Kate stood rooted to the spot as she stared at the old oil painting because there was something disconcertingly familiar about the woman it portrayed. The longer she looked at the face, the more it unsettled her. How could someone she’d never seen or even heard of before be so hauntingly familiar? She stared at the painting
as if mesmerized.

Not noticing Kate’s distraction, Finlay carried on with his commentary. “Malcolm and Lady Carolyn,” he said, with no attempt to hide his disgust.

“What did they do to earn such hatred?” Kate asked.

“I’ll tell you when I give you a tour of the glen, Lady Kate, because it’d be better explained in the places where it happened.”

“Come on, Finlay—you’ve got me intrigued.”

“I couldn’t do the telling of the tale justice with words alone,” Finlay told her. “And, believe me, there’s enough injustice in this story as it is.”

Before Kate could press the old ghillie any further he’d moved along the line of portraits, stopping near the far end at the picture of a sophisticated blonde with her hair pinned up and just a hint of the look of Lady Carolyn about her. She was shown with a silk-gloved hand draped around the shoulder of a handsome, high-cheekboned man. “This is Janette Chisholm. She would be your grandmother’s sister, if I’m not mistaken,” Finlay said. “The two of them never got on at all, from what I heard. I’m not surprised, because Janette was what you might call a bit of a madam. Anyway, they fell out over Struan.” He gestured to the man in the painting. “As you can see, Janette got her man—like she got most of the things she set her sights on.”

“And my grandmother left the country to start a new life in America,” Kate said.

Finlay nodded. Still looking at Janette and Struan, he
said, “These two belonged to what I think was politely referred to as the ‘Lost Generation’, giving themselves over to the pursuit of pleasure after the horrors of the Great War, and burned themselves out while they were still young as a result. They partied like there was no tomorrow, turning Greystane into a northern outpost for their fancy friends from Edinburgh and London.”

Kate imagined the banquet hall filled with jazz from a gramophone horn and smoke from a dozen cigars; with perfume and laughter and loud conversation; the clicking of fingers to summon servants, the popping of champagne corks and the clink of crystal decanters. She imagined handsome, brandy-clutching men in bow ties and dinner jackets, and beautiful women in fishtailed, sequined evening dresses, with silk gloves that came up to their elbows, and foot-long cigarette holders. She could almost see them doing the
Foxtrot
and
Charleston,
like a Jack Vettriano painting come to life. “Do you remember any of those parties?” she asked.

Finlay smiled. “Like they were yesterday,” he told her. “I’ve been playing the pipes since I had enough breath in me to fill a bag, and I used to be invited here to do a turn during the grand bashes. The Chisholms even had a special wee kiltie outfit made up for me with a dress sporran, white lace shirt, and black velvet waistcoat. I suppose I was comic relief for their sophisticated friends. I must have been a funny sight, right enough—an earnest-faced, skinny wee scrap of a boy dressed up to the nines—but
I can remember being pleased as punch with myself, full of my own importance when I marched around the table, playing my heart out.” He smiled at the thought, and the sparkle in his eyes told Kate that as he looked down the banquet hall he was seeing down the years.

Finally coming back to the present, he said, “The table’s on trestles, so that after a banquet it could be cleared away to make room for dancing—Highland or waltz or whatever the fashion of the day. That’s why this floor is wood and not stone,” he added, tapping the polished floorboards with the tip of a burnished brogue. “It’s far easier on the feet.”

“Sounds like you’ve done quite a bit of dancing yourself.”

“Not since the war. No one’s danced in here since the war,” he said, with more than a hint of sadness. “I never did any of that fancy nonsense, you understand, just the Highland dances. Have you ever done any Highland dancing yourself, Lady Kate?”

Kate shook her head. “What’s it like?”

“Oh, it’s fun,” Finlay said, his eyes sparkling again. “During a fling or a reel the floor would shake and the paintings would seem set to jump off the walls as if the people in them wanted to join in. The windows rattled like the glass was ready to fall out of the frames, and the chandelier swung like it might come crashing down on our heads at any moment—and nobody gave a damn, because we were so caught up in the music and the moment.” He let out a wistful sigh and said, “There hasn’t been a night
like that here for more than fifty years. That’s far too long, Lady Kate. But sorry, there’s me ranting on again.”

“Finlay, I love listening to your ‘rants’,” she told him.

He looked away shyly, and in that moment Kate thought he was more like a little boy than an old man.

Kate’s eyes were drawn back to the portraits, and she said, “What happened to them—Janette and Struan?”

“It caught up with them—the curse or their lifestyle, depending on how you want to look at things. Struan’s liver packed up, and Janette didn’t last too much longer. She went grey overnight after he died, and within a year she was dead herself. A heart attack, the doctor said. A broken heart seemed more like it, if you ask me—broken by losing Struan, and by the shock of what happened to her son, Colin.”

Finlay walked to the last portrait in the line and said, “I’ve told you about what Mr. Colin was like when he came back from the war—this is what he was like before he went away.”

The picture showed a dark-haired, dashingly handsome man with clean-cut, well-co-ordinated features, bright blue eyes, and a boyish smile.

“A damn shame,” Finlay said. “Aye, a damn shame.”

Looking at the painting and thinking of the terrible thing that had happened to the man it depicted, Kate said, “Finlay, do you believe there’s some sort of curse on my family?”

The old Highlander pretended not to hear. “You’ll be
wanting to see the rest of the house, now.”

“Finlay!”

“If you’ll just follow me, I’ll show you the lounge and bedrooms,” he said, hurrying past Kate so that he didn’t have to meet her eye or answer her question.

Kate followed him back to the chapel, then through a doorway in its left-hand wall and up a narrow, steeply pitched wooden staircase.

Opening the nearest door when they got to the first-floor landing, Finlay said, “This is the sitting room.”

The room had a 1920s art deco feel to it, and a musty atmosphere of faded, slightly tatty grandeur. It was dominated by a wrought-iron fireplace with an insert of cream ceramic tiles painted in a rosebud pattern. The maroon-toned Oriental rug that covered most of the floor and took the place of a carpet was threadbare; the ivory-colored chaise longue was frayed and grubby, and the matching chairs by the fireside had badly worn armrests. Kate sensed that the room had been furnished by someone with good—and expensive—taste, but had been sorely neglected over the years.

“It’s seen better days,” Finlay said. “A bit like myself.”

Kate smiled, then turned her attention to the pictures on the oak-panelled walls. She took her time to walk around and study each painting in turn. They ranged from idyllic rustic scenes to vivid depictions of battles at sea, with dismasted, smoke-shrouded men-of-war firing broadsides at each other from point-blank range.

“I’m afraid they’re not originals,” Finlay said, confirming what Kate’s practised eye had already discerned.

“Once they were, every one of them, but Mr. Chisholm had to sell them off one by one over the years. He replaced them with prints of the exact same pictures. I didn’t notice the difference, but Mr. Chisholm did.”

“He must have been heartbroken at having to part with them,” Kate said.

“It must be heartbreaking for you thinking about it. Maybe I shouldn’t have told you that he once had the originals.”

“It comes down to whether you take the approach that the glass is half full or half empty, Finlay, and right now my glass seems a lot more than just half full.”

Finlay smiled. “I like that attitude,” he told her. Opening a door to the left of the tall fireplace, he said, “Through here is the study.”

Kate walked into a room whose walls were lined from floor to ceiling with books bound in brown and maroon and dark green leather. There was just room for a rickety old step-ladder, a mahogany escritoire with a computer sitting on it, and a matching chair. “The computer looks so out of place,” Kate said, thinking that a blotter and inkwell would have been much more in keeping with the surroundings than the monitor and keyboard.

“Mr. Chisholm got interested in gene research in his last few years,” Finlay informed her.

Kate couldn’t imagine that as a hobby. Seeing her puzzlement the old ghillie added, “You know, family trees
and things.”

Kate suppressed a smile.

Looking at the packed shelves, Finlay said, “When it was too dreich—sorry, when it was too wet and miserable—to go fishing, this was where Mr. Chisholm came. He must have spent hours looking through atlases and old history books. Armchair travelling and living in the past, I suppose you could say.”

Suddenly claustrophobic, Kate was glad to leave the little room. After they’d climbed another set of stairs Finlay opened the nearest door and said, “This is the master bedroom; there’s a smaller one next door for guests.”

The room contained a four-poster bed in dark wood, with a cream-colored quilt. At the foot of the bed was an ornate French dresser with bowed legs, serpentine front, and a large oval mirror turned so that the silvered side faced the wall. The room’s only window was two panes wide and two high, deeply set and framed by tiny chintz curtains held in place by matching tie-backs. Kate walked towards it, stopping when she was barely half-way there, and said, “Oh, Finlay, the view!”

“Aye, it’s really something. Miss Weir and myself sleep in the attic bedrooms on the next floor—not in the same room, of course,” he added quickly, as if horrified by the thought. “There’re three bedrooms up there, and a small privy, too, and although there’s not much space they each have a little turret with a window seat, and when you’re sitting there you feel like you’re in an eagle’s nest.”

Kate was too taken by the view from her own room to pay much attention to a description of Finlay’s. The window faced directly down the length of the glen. The dark blue ribbon of the lochan stretched out below her, with the forested hillsides rising steeply on either side of it. Other glens were visible in the distance but Kate barely gave them a second glance. She only had eyes for Glen Cranoch.

“—suit you better?”

Kate was so caught up with the view that she only heard the tail end of the question, so she said, “I’m sorry, Finlay, I didn’t quite catch that.”

“I was wondering if you’d like me to show you around the glen this afternoon, or if tomorrow would suit you better.”

“I can’t wait to see it, Finlay, but I’m ready to crash out. As for tomorrow, I’m afraid I have a meeting with Mr. Cunningham in the afternoon. I’ve nothing planned for the day after that, though.”

Finlay looked more than a little put out. “What about tomorrow morning?”

Kate was about to say that she wanted to sleep late, but the look on Finlay’s face made it clear that he’d be terribly disappointed if she didn’t take up his offer. At first she couldn’t work out why it was so important to him—and then she realized he must be wanting to sell her on the attractions of the glen before she met Archibald Cunningham to discuss its fate. “Tomorrow morning would be fine,” she told him.

She turned back to the window for one last look at the
panoramic view.

When she tore her gaze away from the glen, Finlay was gone and she was alone with the four-poster bed. All at once everything caught up with her—the long journey, the uncertainty of what lay at the end of it, and the excitement of seeing Glen Cranoch and Greystane. She kicked off her shoes, lay on top of the quilt, and was asleep the moment her head touched the pillow.