Taken by the Laird (6 page)

“Tell me, MacGowan,” he asked, in spite of his belief that Miss MacLaren was not involved, “do we use any women as carriers?”

“Women? Nay, Laird. I doona believe so.”

“You’re sure?”

“I canna be entirely sure, nay. But I doubt it. I’ve no’ heard of anyone giving o’er to a woman to sell the brandy. Why are ye thinking it, might I ask?”

“Just call me curious. Do you think you can find enough experienced men to let down the brandy tonight? And to carry it out?”

“Aye, Laird. Of course. We’ve none but the best in these parts.”

The laird might think Glenloch’s ghost was not real, but Brianna had seen it. Or seen
something.
She’d felt no danger from that strange flickering light, and as she returned to the bedchamber given her by Laird Glenloch, she kept her gaze high, so she might catch sight of it once again. If only she could speak to it…she knew it was an irrational thought, but…perhaps the phantom might carry a message to her aunt Claire.

She walked in on a housemaid who was doing up the bed. “Oh! Nearly done, miss,” said the girl with a quick curtsy. She was obviously nervous and hurrying to complete her task in order to leave as quickly as possible. “I’m Fiona. Mrs. Ramsay told me to give ye a few extra blankets.”

“I appreciate it. But I can finish here, Fiona.”

“Oh, thank ye, miss. What with the ghost and all, I doona favor being up here.”

“The ghost has done you some evil, then?”

Fiona shook her head. “Nay, I’ve ne’er even seen it. But I doona hold with bogles. Such creatures can do all sorts of harm. Can draw ye into their netherworld and trap ye—”

“Has such a thing happened to anyone?”

“Weel, perhaps some of the old laird’s visitors were caught in the ghost’s traps and followed it into the void,” Fiona said. “But we—from the village—we know better than to come up and stay here through the night.”

Bree said naught. She’d spent one night in Castle Glenloch and felt no threat. On the contrary, she’d slept better than she had any night in the week since
she’d fled London, in spite of her encounter with Laird Glenloch.

“Ronan brought ye plenty of peat, miss. Enough to stay warm through the night.”

“Thank him for me please, Fiona,” said Brianna. “Don’t worry about building up the fire. I’ll stoke it so that you can go back downstairs.”

The girl gave another quick curtsy and started to leave, but Brianna stopped her. “One thing…Where did Ronan find the shawl he brought me?”

“In Lady Glenloch’s chamber at the far end of the gallery, just afore ye come to the north tower,” the maid replied from the doorway. “Her Ladyship’s things are right where she left them. Before she…” Fiona swallowed and wrapped her arms around herself. “Ach, ’tis a wonder she hasna joined Glenloch’s ghost, dyin’ as she did.”

“How do you know she hasn’t?”

“We doona,” Fiona said. A loud keening sound rang out above them, and Fiona gave out a terrified squeal. “ ’Tis her! The bogle!”

“Fiona, ’tis the wind,” Brianna said, but the girl ran from the room, and Bree heard her speedy footsteps all the way down the hall and the staircase.

It went silent in Bree’s bedchamber, but for the crackle of the fire that was burning low, and she wondered if the noise had truly been the wind or the apparition she’d seen the previous night.

Or had she imagined it, as Laird Glenloch had hinted?

She thought about Fiona’s words as well as the laird’s concern that there was only one ghost haunting Glenloch, despite his dismissal of what she’d seen. But Brianna knew that she had not been imagining things. There had truly been a vague form of flickering light in this very chamber. And it had signaled her to follow it.

Brianna considered the possibility that Lady Glenloch’s spirit had joined the castle’s phantom. If the gossip was true, then Amelia Christie had been so terribly unhappy in her marriage that she’d ended her own life. Perhaps her sorrowful spirit now haunted Glenloch’s rooms and galleries alongside the ancient specter described by the laird.

There was a distinctly brooding aspect to the castle. It appeared to Brianna that certain rooms had been restored and updated, and she had even found a modern water closet near the bedchamber Laird Glenloch had given her. But the rest was dark and derelict—a perfect setting to be haunted by Glenloch’s restless spirits.

Bree laid a new brick on the fire, then turned to look up at the ceiling, hoping as well as dreading that the filmy apparition would reappear. She felt sure that spirits would communicate with one another, and…more than anything, Bree wished she could speak with Claire, just once more.

It was a ridiculous notion, she knew, and certainly not a good reason to remain at Glenloch, not when her coat had dried and she could leave. She
should
leave. She should run as fast as her feet would carry her through the cold rain. She believed there was a larger town not
too far south of Falkburn, a place where there would be an inn.

Yet she was warm and secure at Glenloch, and she was not without wits. She could resist Laird Glenloch’s seductive ways until the weather cleared sufficiently for her to go.

As she stood at the nursery window looking out on the low cliffs and the sea below her, she felt the warmth of the fire heating the room…and then something else. It had waited until Fiona had gone, and now Brianna felt it in the room. The ghost.

Slowly Bree turned, and saw the shimmering figure hovering above the bed. This time, Brianna was able to make out the shape of its voluminous gown and a veil arrangement on its head. Brianna was no expert on bygone fashions, but the ghost looked altogether medieval. “Who are you?” she asked it.

The ghost made no reply, but fluctuated, and seemed to float toward the open door.

Brianna rubbed her eyes, then looked up again, half expecting the thing to have disappeared. But the figure seemed to turn and face her, beckoning as she’d done the night before. Again, Bree felt no fear, though a sense of urgency filled her.

“Can you…Can you carry a message for me?” she asked in a hushed tone.

The ghost gave no indication that it understood Bree’s request. “What is it?” Bree asked, disappointed. “Should I follow you?”

An infusion of color changed the appearance of the phantom, and Brianna approached it, ignoring Laird
Glenloch’s admonition not to follow it. “Is there something you wish to show me?”

Perhaps if she went along with it, the thing would grant a request to communicate with Claire.

The shimmering light lost its shape, turning into a vague amorphous glow that moved slowly down the length of the gallery. Brianna walked behind it, passing closed doors and ancient furniture. She hesitated at the staircase that was at the halfway point, and listened to the eerie quiet below, wondering if the servants had already completed their work and left the castle.

The eerie glow of the ghost stopped at the far end of the gallery, near a set of thick oaken doors. It remained floating there, and Brianna watched it, bearing in mind Fiona’s words. If Glenloch’s specter made a practice of pulling people into some ethereal world that destroyed them, this might very well be the way it would do so.

Brianna wavered for a moment, but then sensed the phantom’s urgency, along with some other emotion she could not identify. She took a deep breath and walked past the staircase, heading toward those large doors, but keeping a prudent distance from the ghost.

The shimmering light dissipated, and Brianna tried the latch, but found it locked. “The way is blocked,” she said quietly.

But the phantom seemed undeterred, reappearing again just outside the last room they’d passed. Its door was also closed, but the phantom somehow slipped inside.

Brianna tried the door, and found it unlocked. She
pushed it open and stood under the lintel for a moment, then stepped inside.

The room was in shadows, and cold, in spite of the lush furnishings within. The wide bed was covered in a thick, rich brocade of blue and yellow. The bed curtains had been pulled aside and tied with golden tassels, as though waiting for its usual occupant to return. This was clearly the room Fiona had indicated belonged to Laird Glenloch’s wife.

Brianna felt like an intruder. She should turn around and leave, but her curiosity got the better of her. She took another step into the room and stood at the foot of the bed where Lady Glenloch had slept, trying to understand how it was possible to be so despondent as to take one’s own life.

Bree went to Amelia’s richly carved, mahogany dressing table and touched the brush and ornate combs that lay there. She herself had felt a terrible, deep grief at the loss of her beloved aunt, and she was on the verge of being forced into an abhorrent marriage. And yet Brianna would never dream of doing herself in, of ending it all. She could not imagine what had driven Lady Glenloch to such despair.

Surely not her husband.

Now that Brianna had actually met the rakish Laird Glenloch, she did not understand how his wife could have felt so discontented. But her questions faded when the ghostly glow of the phantom returned, its light fluctuating like the unsteady light of a candle. It seemed to flatten against the wall above the table, then a few strange sparkles of light slid down, flowing almost like
a stream of water, to disappear below. Bree tried to look down into the space where it disappeared, speculating that there was something the ghost wanted her to notice. But there was hardly any gap between the wall and the table.

Brianna touched the wall, then slid her hand down the same path the ghost’s light had taken, stopping when her fingers met the rough side of the table.

She pushed the table aside and looked down at the floor. There was nothing. She started to move the table back, but caught sight of something that had caught on the rough edge of the table. She reached down and came up with a long gold chain with a locket attached.

She knew of married ladies who wore miniatures of their husbands or children in their lockets. Bree snapped it open, expecting to see a small picture of Laird Glenloch, but it was another man altogether. Brianna did not recognize him, but it was obviously not Laird Glenloch.

Perhaps it was a portrait of her father or a brother.

Or a paramour.

Brianna closed the locket in her hand and glanced about the room, looking for the ghost, for some explanation of what she held in her hand. But Bree had been left alone to wonder if the phantom’s intent was to indicate something about Lady Glenloch’s affections.

Feeling distinctly troubled, she quickly replaced the chain exactly where she found it and shoved the dressing table back against the wall. “Whatever she might have done, the woman is dead,” Bree admonished the ghost, who must be hovering somewhere nearby. “ ’Tis
not right to intrude on her privacy.” Though Brianna could not imagine a wife who would cuckold Laird Glenloch.

He did not seem to be a brute, nor was he unkind. If Bree had been his wife—

She gathered the front of her shawl in her fist. She intended never to find herself in such a position, ever. There would be no marriage to Roddington or to anyone else. After Bernard’s defection, she had decided to spend her life as Claire had done—as an independent woman, free to travel, or to raise her horses as she pleased. She might go to Greece and spend a few years there, in the village where Claire had lived before coming to London to take Brianna away from Lord Stamford.

Or maybe she’d go to France on an extended trip and see about buying some new stallions to improve the Killiedown stock.

Feeling like an intruder in the dead woman’s room, Brianna exited, closing the door behind her. Where Lady Glenloch had placed her affections had naught to do with her, though Brianna wished she could be as immune to Laird Glenloch as his wife seemed to have been.

Brianna returned to her room and wondered how she was going to manage to avoid the laird’s advances this evening, after the servants had all gone. She had never been so susceptible to any other man, not even Bernard Malham. And her reaction to him was bothersome. She could not allow herself to succumb.

“If you can help me,” she whispered, hoping the ghost might be hovering somewhere nearby, “now would be a
good time.” For she knew the power of Laird Glenloch’s touch, of his kiss.

But there was no reply, no strange flicker of light anywhere in sight. Brianna was on her own in this, and she could not leave until the weather cleared.

She collected her dry clothes into the oilcloth, being careful to place her money securely in the center of it. She’d brought enough to keep her in decent lodgings at Dundee for more than two months, and pay for a few extras, besides. Such as transportation back to Killiedown when it was time to go home. And perhaps a lawyer to help her claim her inheritance.

In the meantime, she could not allow herself to yield to Laird Glenloch’s seductive charms. She knew ’twas unwise to spend time alone with such a gazetted rake, but there were no other options, not while the brutal weather persisted.

She turned her thoughts to the horses at Killiedown, rather than the sensation of Glenloch’s strong hands on her shoulders, sliding down her arms. She managed to avoid shivering at the memory of his breath in her ear, stirring her as no man had ever done.

She considered the breed of horses Claire had developed over the past eight years, teaching Brianna everything she knew. Bree had loved their life up north of Stonehaven, and still could not understand Claire’s insistence that Brianna go to London to find a husband. It had been a pointless exercise after Bernard’s abandonment, and Bree had wanted nothing more than to return home.

Now Claire was dead, and Brianna found herself in a
perilous predicament here at Castle Glenloch. It would be even worse at Killiedown Manor, for Lord Stamford would surely go looking for her there. Fortunately, Bree had all she needed to survive in Dundee for two months, and when she was twenty-one, she could return to Claire’s estate and resume the life she wanted.

But she had to get to Dundee first.

With a sigh of frustration, Brianna recognized there was nothing she could do about it now but wait for an opportune moment. If only the clouds would break, she could slip away unnoticed. Since they did not, she decided to go down to the library as she’d told Laird Glenloch she would do. Far better for him to find her there, rather than coming into her bedchamber again.