Royal Flush (7 page)

Chapter 10

Castle Rannoch
August 17
Late.

As we emerged from Binky’s den and came down the corridor to the great hall, a noisy party was coming out of the drawing room, at the far end of the opposite hallway.

“And so I said to him, ‘You simply don’t have the equipment, honey,’ and he said, ‘I’ve got a bloody great big one, and what’s more, when it’s revved up, it goes like a ramrod.’ He thought we were still talking about the boat.”

There was a roar of laughter. Even though they were still a good distance away and bathed in shadow, I recognized the speaker before I could get a good look at her. It was, of course, the dreaded American woman, Mrs. Wallis Simpson. As she came closer I noticed that she was looking rather thin, angular and masculine in a metallic pewter-gray evening dress and matching metallic helmet. And old. She was definitely beginning to look her age, I thought with satisfaction.

“Wallis, honey, you are shameless.” The speaker was an older woman, dressed in sober black. She was statuesque in build and towered over Mrs. Simpson, but she carried herself well with a regal air, rather like a larger version of Queen Mary. “How you can tell tales like that in public I don’t know. Thank heavens Rudi is not still alive to hear.”

“Oh, don’t come the countess with me, Merion,” Wallis Simpson said. “I remember you when you were plain old Miss Webster, remember? You took me for root beer floats at Mr. Hinkle’s soda fountain in Baltimore when I was just a toddler, and you flirted with that young guy behind the counter!”

“Who is that?” I murmured to Fig, indicating the older woman.

“Oh, she’s the Countess Von Sauer.”

“I thought you said they were all Americans.”

“They are. She’s part of the Simpson woman’s party. She was originally called something perfectly ordinary like Webster but she did her tour of Europe and snagged herself an Austrian count. I don’t think the Simpson woman has forgiven her for one-upping her on the social scale.”

“She’s trying hard enough to remedy that now,” I muttered to Fig.

“She certainly is. The Prince of Wales has been over here to visit almost every evening. I told him I didn’t approve and he said I was a prude. When have I ever been a prude, Georgiana? I consider myself as broad-minded as anybody. After all, I did grow up on a farm.”

“Fritzi, honey, I left my wrap. Be an angel and fetch it for me or I shall freeze.” The countess turned to a large, pink young man who was trailing at the back of the party. “It’s positively frigid in here. It makes our Austrian castle feel like the Côte d’Azur.”

“Mama, you’re always forgetting things. I shall be worn to a rail if you keep me running around like this. Do you know how far it is to your room from here? And all those horrible stairs?”

I turned to Fig again.

“She’s also brought her reprobate son with her,” she muttered. “He piles his plate with all the good sandwiches at tea and he pinches the maids’ bottoms.”

“Hasn’t the keep-fit movement reached Austria yet?” one of the men in the party asked. “Babe can’t start the day without her gymnastics and dumbbells, can you, Babe, honey?”

“I sure can’t,” a petite, bony woman replied.

At that moment they emerged into the great hall and Wallis Simpson noticed me. “Why, it’s the actress’s daughter,” she said. “What a surprise. When did you get here?”

I was still feeling angry on behalf of Fig and Binky and wasn’t about to take any of her cutting remarks. “Actually it’s the duke’s daughter,” I said, “and the current duke’s sister, and the king’s cousin and great-granddaughter to Queen Victoria, and you are currently a guest in my ancestral home.”

“Ouch,” said a man who had been lingering at the back of the party. I recognized him as Mr. Simpson, the invisible and until now silent husband. “I reckon you’ve met your match there, Wallis.”

“Nonsense,” she said with a guttural chuckle. “It’s lack of sex. It makes people touchy. We should do the kind thing and get her hitched up with a gamekeeper while she’s up here. Think of Lady Chatterley.”

And they went into peals of laughter again.

“Who is Lady Chatterley?” Fig whispered to me.

“A character in a book, by D. H. Lawrence. It’s banned over here. He had it printed in Italy, and there are smuggled copies all over the place.”

“And what’s so terrible about it?”

“The lady and the gamekeeper have a continuous roll in the hay together and describe it with four-letter farm words.”

“How disgusting,” Fig said. “I bet the writer has never seen a real gamekeeper, or he’d never have thought they had sex appeal. They smell of dead rabbits, for one thing.”

“One of these days you’ll go too far, Wallis,” Mr. Simpson said sharply.

She glanced up at him, then put a hand up to his cheek and chuckled again. “I don’t think so. I believe I know exactly how far I can go.”

The big man in the party now came over to me, his hand extended. “So you’re the young lady of the family, are you? Glad to meet you. I’m Earl Sanders. This is my wife, Babe.”

I shook hands all around. I noticed Mrs. Simpson didn’t offer hers.

“So who is up for whist or bridge?” Wallis Simpson asked. “Or shall we be devils and play roulette?”

“I’m afraid we don’t possess a roulette wheel,” Fig said frostily. “If we choose to gamble, we go to Monte Carlo.”

“Don’t worry, Earl’s brought his own,” Mrs. Simpson said. “He can’t go more than a day without gambling, can you, Earl honey?”

“The question is where are we going to play without freezing to death and without having the cards blown away by a howling gale?” the Countess Von Sauer asked. “Surely not in here.”

“I was sensible enough to bring my mink,” Babe said. Her morning keep-fit regimen was certainly paying off. She hadn’t an ounce of spare flesh on her and made the angular Mrs. Simpson look positively feminine. No wonder she was cold. She turned to her husband and retrieved the fur from him, wrapping it snugly around her shoulders. “I even wore it in bed last night. My dears, the draft from that window. It wouldn’t close properly and there was a hurricane blowing.”

“Will the drawing room not do?” Fig asked. “I can have the servants move back the sofas and set up tables.”

“There are some rather loud young men in there, smoking up a storm and working their way through the whiskey decanter,” Mrs. Simpson said.

“See, what did I tell you?” Fig muttered.

“Then it will have to be in here,” Fig said out loud. “I’ll call the servants.”

“How about that nice little room that looks out on the lake?” Babe suggested. “The one where we had coffee this morning.”

“But that’s the morning room.” Fig sounded horrified.

“So is it a crime to go in there after noon?” Wallis Simpson asked with amusement. “Really, I find all these British rules too, too fascinating.”

“I suppose you can use it if you insist upon it,” Fig said. “It’s just that we never do. Not after luncheon.”

“It’s probably haunted,” the big man chuckled. “The ghost only appears after the stroke of twelve midday. Babe swears she saw a white figure floating down the corridor upstairs.”

“That would be the White Lady of Rannoch,” I said. “Did you hear her moaning? She often moans.”

“Moans?” Babe looked apprehensive.

“Frightfully,” I said. “She was thrown in the loch with a great stone tied to her for being a witch. The locals also say that they see bubbles coming up from the loch and that could be the White Lady returning. Of course, it could be just the monster.”

“Monster?” The countess sounded alarmed now.

“Oh yes. Didn’t you hear we have a famous monster in the loch? It’s been there for hundreds of years.”

“Mercy me,” the countess said. “I think I might skip the cards tonight and go straight to bed. Fritzi, would you pop up ahead of me and make sure there’s a hot water bottle in the bed and that my nightdress is wrapped around it?”

“Of course, Mama.” He nodded dutifully and went.

“Well, I need my nightly gamble,” the big man said. “You guys go take a look at that morning room place and I’ll go fetch the roulette wheel.”

They disappeared. Fig looked at me. “Now you can see for yourself,” she said. “Torment, utter torment. Did you ever hear of anyone wanting to use the morning room after luncheon?”

“Never,” I agreed.

“You’d think the one who became a countess would know better, wouldn’t you? She does have a castle in Austria.”

“And the other man is an earl, isn’t he?” I commented, watching his large retreating rear.

Fig broke into tense laughter. “No, that’s just his Christian name. I made the same mistake and called his wife ‘countess’ and she thought it was a hoot.” She went to walk ahead then turned back to me. “But tell me, what was all that about the White Lady of Rannoch? I’ve never heard of her.”

“I made her up,” I said. “It occurred to me that if you want the Americans to leave, you should make them want to leave. The occasional nighttime haunting by the family ghost might help to do the trick.”

“Georgiana, you are wicked,” Fig said, but she was beaming at me with admiration.

“And we can institute some other measures to make them uncomfortable,” I said. “Turn down the boiler, for one thing. We did that at Rannoch House when we wanted the German baroness to move. They won’t stay if they can’t get their hot showers.”

“Brilliant!” Fig was still beaming.

“And does Fergus still play the pipes?” I asked, referring to one of our grooms who led the local pipe band.

“He does.”

“Have him play them on the battlements at dawn, like they used to do in the old days. Oh, and serve them haggis for breakfast. . . .”

“Georgiana, I—I mean, we couldn’t. Word would get back to the Prince of Wales and he’d be angry with Binky.”

“What for?” I asked. “We’re just carrying on our normal family traditions to make them feel welcome.”

She stared at me hopefully. “Do you really think we dare?”

“Let me put it this way: how long do you want them to stay here?”

“We’ll do it,” she exclaimed. “We’ll turn it into a castle of horrors!”

The sound of laughter erupted down the hallway from the direction of the drawing room. “And I should go and remove the whiskey decanter from those two cousins of yours,” she said. “They break things when they get drunk.”

“I suppose I should come and say hello,” I said hesitantly.

“You should.” Fig strode ahead. She pushed open the drawing room door. Two young men in kilts looked up as we came in. The room was in a fog of cigar smoke—Binky’s cigars, I suspected.

“Och, hello, Cousin Fig. Come and join us,” one of them said. “We’re just celebrating the removal of the American terror.”

“And finishing Binky’s good Scotch, I notice,” Fig said, holding up an almost empty decanter. “When it’s gone there isn’t any more, you know. We’re absolutely paupers, Murdoch.”

Murdoch’s eyes drifted past her to see me standing in the doorway. “And who’s yon bonnie wee lassie?”

“This is your cousin Georgiana,” Fig said. “Georgiana, these are your cousins Lachan and Murdoch. I don’t believe you’ve met for many years.”

Two giants with sandy hair rose to their feet. They were both wearing kilts. One had a red beard and looked like the Rannoch ancestors come to life. Then I looked at the other. He was clean shaven and was—well, rather good-looking. Tall, muscled, rugged. Like a Greek god, in fact. He held out his hand to me. “No, this is never little Georgie. Remember when you used to make me play at being your horse and carry you around the estate on my back?”

“Oh, that was you.” I smiled, the memory returning. “I do remember when Murdoch threw that tree trunk through the window.”

“Och, he does things like that,” Lachan said, still smiling down at me and still holding my hand. “So come and sit down, have a wee dram, and tell us what you’ve been doing.”

“I’ve just had a drink with Fig,” I said, in case she thought I might be joining the enemy. “And I’ve been leading a blameless life in London. How about the two of you?”

“Running the estate, mainly,” Murdoch said. “We can’t afford the manpower any longer so we both have to work like dogs to make a go of it.”

“Apart from the times you’re away at your Highland Games,” Lachan pointed out.

“I win prizes at those Highland Games. Didn’t I win us a pig last year? And a barrel of whiskey?”

“You did. But then you also went down to Aintree for the races and then to St. Andrew’s for the golf,” Lachan said with a grin.

“Well, that’s business, isn’t it?” Murdoch replied. “I have to go to Aintree to watch our racehorses.”

“While I’m stuck at home dipping the sheep.”

“Of course, I’m the elder.”

“But I’m the smarter.”

“You are not. Whatever put such an idea into your thick head?”

They had half risen to their feet. Fig looked at me nervously, suspecting this might come to blows. “Georgiana, you really should look in on your brother before he goes to sleep.”

“Of course,” I said. “Excuse me, won’t you?”

“Come back when you’re done,” Lachan said. As I went out I heard him say, “Whoever thought that wee Georgie would turn out so nicely?”