Highland Mist (6 page)

CHAPTER SEVEN

Yet
a fortnight later they did touch again.

Toni returned to London, with Charles escorting her as far as her mother’s flat. In fact, he accompanied her right inside and explained to Celia the reason why they had still not seen Inverada House.

But the famous head of
Marceline Drew
Beauty Products didn’t seem to be able to understand why they had travelled so far, and been almost within shouting distance of the house her Uncle Angus had left to her, and not felt that they must inspect the place before returning. Toni’s wan cheeks, and the fact that she had a nasty cough which would require treatment before it was better, didn’t touch her maternal instincts as quickly or as naturally as one might have supposed. As Charles—who had never really thought very much about the relationship between Toni and her mother before this—certainly supposed.

“My good girl,” he said, with a certain amount of astonishment, when she pressed to know why they hadn’t gone on. “The conditions were impossible, and Toni was ill. She was very ill indeed for one whole night which I shall never forget, and there wasn’t even a proper bed for her to sleep on. The conditions were primitive, and the whole episode was fantastic.”

“But when you got to the hotel in Inverechy you were quite comfortable, weren’t you? Couldn’t you have stayed there for a bit?”

“For how long?” Charles enquired, his eyebrows ascending. “Until the spring—which I believe is a little late in these parts—set in? Or until we had a detailed road report concerning the roads around Inverada, your henchwoman and her husband had returned to take up residence, and everyone was talking because Toni and I seemed to have no particular reason for taking up our residence in the local hotel?”

“Don’t be silly,” Celia returned, as if surprised. “As if anyone would talk about you and Toni! Why, you’re old enough to be her father ... or almost!”

“Thank you!” Charles exclaimed coldly. “I don’t feel in the least like Toni’s father, and as I’m only just thirty-seven and she tells me she’s nearly twenty I can’t honestly see why I should be suspected of being her parent. Any more than you could be suspected of being my mother!”

Celia looked amused.

“I’m sorry, darling, but I didn’t mean you to look old. And to me Toni’s just a child...”

“She’s a grown-up young woman, and you’d better start thinking of her as such,” Charles returned, still coldly. “And you’d better get your doctor along to give her a check-up after the attack she had up north. That fellow MacLeod didn’t strike me as being a fool, and he was quite worried about her for a few hours—it seems she’s a tendency to be chesty.”

“Oh, indeed?” Celia said, her own voice suddenly rather chilly. “Then that’s the first I’ve heard of it, and I’m her mother. But then you can hardly expect anyone—even an exceptionally strong young woman—to survive rolling about in the snow in the middle of a blizzard without something to show for it, if that isn’t too flippant a way of putting it!”

“No, I know.” Charles sounded very penitent all at once. He smiled at Toni as he had formed a habit of smiling at her lately, with something very kindly and soft in his eyes, and rather a whimsical quirk to one side of his mouth. “It was my fault, and I’m fully aware of it, for not keeping a tighter hold of her, and letting that torch drop out of my hand. However, Toni’s forgiven me, and I’ve promised not to do it again, and I still think you ought to let her see a doctor.”

Toni stifled a fit of coughing, and insisted that there was nothing wrong with her, but her mother agreed that they would call in Dr. Beresford to do something about the cough before it got any worse. Then, with sudden curiosity, she demanded:

“Tell me some more about this Dr
.
... MacLeod, did you say his name was? What was he doing pigging it in such a tiny cottage, and why hasn’t he got a practice like most other doctors? The name MacLeod seems to ring a bell, somehow. What is his other name? His Christian name, do you know?” Charles confessed that he did not know, but Toni said quietly:

“Euan. Euan MacLeod.”

“Good heavens!” her mother exclaimed. “It was a Euan MacLeod who was mentioned in Uncle Angus’s will ... in fact,” with a hint of petulance and the first sign of criticism of Uncle Angus, “he left him all his money, or any money he had to leave. I don’t know how much it was, but we can find out. Uncle Angus was terribly rich at one time, but he seems to have lived like a miser for years. I’ll ring my solicitor some time today and find out just how much he did leave.”

“If Euan MacLeod is anything to go by it was precious little,” Charles remarked. “And that ties up with the tales we heard about the house ... Inverada House. It’s in a very bad state of repair, and MacLeod didn’t seem to think we’d be very comfortable if we attempted to stay there.”

“Nevertheless, I intend to go up there and stay there myself as soon as the weather is better,” Celia announced, as if she had only just taken the decision. “And you two can either come with me or stay here where you’re not likely to be snowed up,” with a faint but unmistakable sneer in her voice.

Later that day she got in touch by telephone with her solicitor, and when she came from the instrument and joined Toni in the kitchen, where Toni was making a batch of scones for tea, she was looking slightly bemused.

“Do you know how much Uncle Angus left that young man, Euan MacLeod?”

Toni shook her head automatically.

“One hundred and twenty thousand pounds!
One hundred and twenty thousand pounds!
And that’s after death duties have been deducted! It seems Uncle Angus had interests abroad ... very rich interests!”

“I don’t believe it.” Toni set down the flour dredger and pushed back her hair from her forehead. She could see Euan MacLeod’s worn and shabby duffle coat so clearly that he might have been standing in the kitchen with her and wearing it ... particularly as she could see every other detail of him without the slightest effort. “He looked so poor, and he didn’t behave in the least as if he had just inherited a large sum of money.”

“A vast sum of money!” Celia corrected her. “My dear, that young man is obviously an eccentric, but I’ve a feeling he could be worth cultivating. Very well worth cultivating!”

“But he doesn’t want to be cultivated.” Toni spoke impulsively, remembering how Euan had talked of ships that pass in the night. “And we don’t know where he lives.”

“We know he owns that cottage, and you could get in touch with him there. Write him a little ‘thank you’ letter, and ask him to look us up when he comes to London. After all, he and I are joint beneficiaries under the terms of Uncle Angus’s will, and I am Uncle Angus’s niece. It’s only natural I should wish to get in touch with the other main beneficiary, and in addition I’m grateful to him for what he did for you. I must let him know that.”

“Then you write to him,” Toni said quickly, rolling out her scone mixture. “But please don’t even ask me to do so!”

Her mother smiled at her.

“You’re a foolish girl. You’ve had a unique experience, and the man who saved your life for you—a doctor, too, and doctors are always so fascinating!—is young and personable and rich. You did say he is quite good-looking, didn’t you?”

“I don’t think I mentioned his looks,” Toni stammered.

“No, but Charles took such a dislike to him that I’m quite sure he had something in addition to a tumble-down cottage. Charles is such a fascinating man himself he doesn’t like other fascinating men.”

She went away to write her letter, and Toni tried to decide in her own mind whether Euan MacLeod was personable. He was certainly very much a man ... tall and strong and rather more than a trifle arrogant. Even his hair, dark as a blackbird’s plumage in places, and with a hint of auburn in others, had an arrogant curl, and his lips occasionally had a matching curl to them.

But he wasn’t always arrogant. When the occasion demanded he could be as considerate as a woman ... much more considerate than a good many women. She had a few vague memories, that she tried to get clear sometimes, of that night when her temperature had got out of hand, and he had done so many things for her. Looked after her with the patience and skill of a highly trained nurse.

But he was not a nurse, he was a doctor, with strong hands and long, slim, sensitive fingers, and a bedside manner which he donned like a mantle, although at other times he could be curt and almost rude. She was quite sure he would be rude to her mother and not answer her letter, but in that she was wrong. His reply came almost immediately, and Celia showed it to her in triumph.

“Read that! she said, tossing the letter across the breakfast table, and Toni read it.

“Dear Mrs. Drew”, it began.

“
There was not the smallest need for you to thank me for anything I did for your daughter. I was happy to be of assistance.

“
I think we must be very distantly connected. Angus Drummond adopted me when I was a very small boy, but my mother was a kind of cousin of his, although many times removed. I shall be in London on the twenty-fourth and, if I may, I will get in touch with you. Perhaps you and your daughter will dine with me one evening.

Euan MacLeod.’

“Well, what do you think of that?” Celia demanded.

Toni handed back the letter. It was on quite good notepaper, and the handwriting was small and fine, with a good deal of determination in the final strokes and capitals, and no flourishes whatsoever. An intensely masculine handwriting, in fact.

“What should I think?” she counter-questioned, and her mother looked almost astonished.

“What an extraordinary child you are,” she declared. “This man is a sort of relative of ours, and he has just inherited a fortune. He has already met you, and he wants to see you again. That much is obvious!”

Toni regarded her in faint concern.

“In what way is it obvious?” she asked.

Celia made an impatient movement with her trim shoulders. She was all ready to set off for her office, wearing something very smart, and in the bright sunshine of a blustery March morning which streamed through the window of the gay breakfast alcove which was a part of their kitchen there was not a line in her face, or even a suspicion of sagging skin under the delicate outline of her jaw.

She might have been twenty, Toni thought ... or even eighteen. A delightful, girlish figure with a radiant complexion and the most beautiful chestnut hair in the world.

“Oh, my dear, why can’t you be your age?” Celia pleaded. “And, as Charles reminded me only the other day, you’re nearly twenty, so you ought to be able to follow a process of natural thought. Most girls of nearly twenty have at least a dozen young men hanging round them—” As Celia had always discouraged young men hanging round her only daughter, who was so useful as a housekeeper, this was not entirely fair—“but so far as I know you haven’t even a solitary boy friend! Now, Euan MacLeod met you under extraordinary circumstances and has obviously thought about you more than once since—”

“Mother!” Toni exclaimed in a startled voice, following the line of her thought at last.

“Otherwise he wouldn’t have bothered to answer my letter,” Celia finished complacently. “He doesn’t know me, or want to know me; to him I’m just the mother of a girl who intrigued him, and I might be fat and matronly, just like any other mother of a twenty-year-old,” with a tiny smile of satisfaction because she was not. Indeed, nothing of the kind. “So I’m going to seize the bull by the horns and get you fitted out with a complete new outfit of clothes, and when he comes to London we’ll dazzle him ... or you will!”

Toni protested, almost with a feeling of outrage but Celia didn’t even listen to her horrified exclamations because such a plan of campaign was so horribly blatant, and in any case Euan MacLeod wasn’t the sort of man to be caught in such an obvious net. He was a man who didn’t appear to have very much time for women, for one thing.

“No?” Celia went off to Bond Street with rather a pitying look of amusement in her eyes. “All men have time for women, and this one has provided me with an entirely new idea ... in connection with Inverada House, I mean. I no longer want to run it as a guest-house. I’ve thought of something much nicer for it!”

When Charles Henderson looked in one morning about a week later he found Toni almost knee-deep in tissue paper, and on every chair and occasional table there were cardboard boxes cascading some delectable examples of feminine wearing apparel. Toni herself was holding in her hands an evening gown of water-green nylon tulle, with some crystal embroidery like dewdrops on the bodice, when he walked in—he never bothered to knock, and just turned the handle of the front door, which was usually unlocked—and regarded her thoughtfully.

“Hullo!” he said, as her brown eyes were raised to him above the green dress. Then something about the combination of warm brown eyes and such a delicate green, some absurd thought that entered his head and was concerned with dryads and woodland glades, prevented him saying anything more.

“Hullo!” Toni echoed, rather shyly. Since her trip to Scotland with Charles she was often shy when she greeted him, in a way she had never been before. It could have had something to do with the way he looked at her nowadays, not as if she was her mother’s cook-housekeeper, but a girl he had only recently discovered.

“What’s all this in aid of?” he asked, indicating the tissue paper and the dress boxes. “Don’t tell me Celia’s decided to buy you a trousseau before you’re even engaged?”

There was a certain wryness about the twist of his lips as he spoke, but Toni didn’t really notice it. She was only thinking, as she always did, that few men managed to do their tailor the justice that he did, and marvelling that she had once been isolated with him in the lonely Highlands of Scotland, with only another man—who was almost as interesting in quite a different way—to turn them into a trio.

“Do you like it?” she asked, returning the green dress to its box and folding the tissue paper round it lovingly.

“I think it could hardly suit you better than it does, if that’s what you want to know,” he replied with a smile.

She smiled back at him, with the same tinge of shyness.

“Celia has been spending a lot of money on me because she thought I needed some new clothes,” she told him.

“In order that you can complete the devastation you’ve already worked on a young man who has just come into a nice fortune of one hundred and twenty thousand?”

She gazed at him in astonishment.

“How did you know?” she asked, and then coloured furiously and added: “Of course, it’s only a ridiculous idea of Celia’s, and you know very well that Euan MacLeod hardly took any notice of me. I can’t imagine him taking notice of any woman.”

“Can’t you?” He walked right into the room and sat on the arm of a chair that was not occupied. “Well, I don’t know about ‘any woman’, but he was very concerned about you. I think he took an instantaneous dislike to me because I was with you. He would have much preferred it—and probably been many degrees politer and more charming—if I hadn’t existed at all!”

“What rubbish!” she declared, and looked at him with the colour fluctuating in her cheeks.

“It isn’t rubbish,” he told her soberly. “It’s the truth. And it’s because it’s the truth that he’s agreed to come to London.”

Her brown eyes were very serious as she studied him steadily. She wondered whether he would be shocked—and whether, perhaps, he would be badly alarmed—if she told him what Euan MacLeod had predicted for her future, and how he had linked that future up with Charles’s.

“
He may be a friend of your mother’s, but I think you’ll marry him one day
.”

That was absurd, of course, but a man who had taken even a fleeting interest in a girl didn’t predict her marriage to another man ... not casually, cynically, coolly. With hard blue eyes a trifle harder than usual.

“Don’t take any notice of my mother,” she said hastily, gathering up more tissue paper and thrusting it back into the boxes. “She gets these ideas, as you know ... ideas like that one about turning Inverada House into a guest-house.”

“But now, in case you didn’t know it, she has decided that you and Euan MacLeod can live there and be happy ever afterwards ... following a certain amount of repair to the house, complete refurnishing, and so forth. And on his money that should be quite a simple matter!”

“Oh!” Toni exclaimed, and this time her face flamed like a peony. Charles went to her and lifted her chin and looked deep into her brown eyes. “Didn’t you know that, Toni?”

“I just know that she’s being rather foolish.” He kept his hand beneath her chin, and went on looking into her eyes. She could smell the heady fragrance of his shaving lotion and the faint fragrance of his tobacco, and her head whirled. She knew that her heart was beating very fast.

“I’m glad you’ve got some pretty things, Toni,” he said quietly. “Celia hasn’t been very generous to you up to date, and you deserve pretty things. But they’re not to be worn for the benefit of this MacLeod person ... at least, not all of them! Let me take you out to dinner one night and wear that green dress you were holding up to yourself when I came in just now. Will you?”

Toni stared up at him, trying to prevent her long eyelashes from blinking in utter surprise.

“But what would Celia say?” she got out with the awkwardness of a schoolgirl.

She could almost feel him stiffen and freeze.

“It has nothing whatever to do with Celia ... except that I’d have to ask her permission!”

But she couldn’t accept that.

“Nothing?” she echoed faintly.

“Nothing.” He frowned in such a way that she knew he was suddenly acutely annoyed, and his voice sounded harsh and rebuking. “I don’t know what kind of ideas a small head like yours is liable to get inside it, Toni, but your mother and I are excellent friends. You believe that, don’t you?” She didn’t answer.

He pinched her chin and then released it, and walked away to the window.

“Have dinner with me tomorrow night, Toni.”

“I’m afraid we’re dining with Dr. MacLeod.”

“Ah, yes.” There was something mocking in his tone as he turned towards her. “I shouldn’t have forgotten then, for Celia has already made me aware of your engagement for tomorrow. But one night when you’re not tied up with MacLeod will you dine with me? Make it a promise!”

She stood quite still, staring at her feet, wondering whether he could hear the violent beating of her heart—wondering, also, whether he had quarrelled recently with her mother, something that did happen sometimes and affected their attitude towards one another.

“All right,” she said, at last. “It’s a promise!”

“Good girl!” he exclaimed, and walked to the door. Without saying another word—not even a casual goodbye—he walked out of the flat, and she stood staring down at her new clothes, wondering why they no longer delighted her as much as they had done. Wondering why she suddenly had a mental picture of herself wrapped up in MacLeod’s dressing-gown, that had been much too large for her and had also smelt of tobacco.

But not the expensive kind Charles used.