Mia Marlowe (20 page)

He just had trouble turning pages. Brodie could manipulate objects in the material world, but it required intense concentration and no little effort on his part. A book would have to be a cracking good tale for him to flip through all those pages. Fortunately, there was a large book already laid open on the heavy oak desk.

Brodie hovered lower and took a peek. It wasn’t a printed volume. It was an illuminated manuscript, copied out by a precise hand long before Gutenberg churned out his first Bible. The book was opened to a genealogical chart for the Lyttle family spread out on facing pages, decorated with curlicues and fanciful beasts. Sure enough, there was Lyall Lyttle, the current butler of Bonniebroch. . . .

“It canna be.”
Brodie sank down to make sure he wasn’t imagining things, but the quill scratchings remained the same. He shot up and through the library ceiling, then made for the largest window facing the open bailey below.

“I dinna understand it. The book was right here.” Lucinda scoured the floor-to-ceiling shelves that were full to bursting with leather-bound manuscripts. An astrolabe and sextant was propped on one shelf and a stuffed marmot was poised to pounce from another. Mr. Lyttle studied the tips of his shoes with absorption.

Alexander slowly circuited the room. “Was there a title on the binding?”

“I didna think to look. It was lying out here before God and everybody. Someone,” Lucinda said, shooting an accusing glance toward Mr. Lyttle, “has gone to the trouble of putting it away.”

The butler refused to meet her gaze.

“Did you move it, Lyttle?” Alex asked.

“No, milord, upon my word, I didna.”

Alexander sighed noisily. “It’ll take forever to find if we have to go through all the volumes in this room. What was so troubling about this book that you had to drag me away from the stables?”

Lucinda sighed too. Less noisily. “Ye’ll no’ believe me if I canna show ye.”

He came across the room and took her into his arms, heedless of the fact that their butler was looking on. “I’d believe you if you told me the sun rose in the west and set in the east.”

“But it would be so much easier if ye could see it with your own eyes. It was a genealogy chart for our Mr. Lyttle.”

“Oh?” He turned back to the butler. “Do you know what this is about then?”

Mr. Lyttle worried his lower lip but didn’t respond.

“Let me refresh your memory. ’Tis remarkable enough,” Lucinda said. “The chart in the book shows ye were born in the year 1489.”

Alex laughed. “Lu, names run in families. Likely our butler had a many-times-great-great-grandfather of the same name.”

“One who was married to a lady named Dorcas, the same as our Mr. Lyttle? And sired a set of twins whom he named Duncan and Dorrel,” Lucinda said. “Refresh
my
memory, Mr. Lyttle. What are your sons’ names?”

The butler shifted his weight from one foot to the other. “Dorrel and Duncan.”

“And they are twins, aye?”

Like all the chambers in the castle, the library was on the coolish side. The fire in the grate did little to dispel the cold, but Mr. Lyttle pulled a crisp white handkerchief from his pocket and mopped his brow in any case. “Aye, me boys are twins.”

Lucinda crossed the room to stand directly before him. “When were they born, Mr. Lyttle?”

He swallowed hard. “On the sixth day of September, milady.”

She arched a brow at him.

He dropped his gaze. “In the year of Our Lord 1514.” Then he looked up, his eyes darting back and forth between her and Alexander. “But ye were no’ supposed to learn about the peculiarities of Bonniebroch like this. Mr. Farquhar wanted to explain things to ye his own self, I’m sure.”

“Good idea. I can’t wait to hear his explanation for this. Oh, wait, I have one. You’re all mad as hatters,” Alex said, his voice tight. “Farquhar’s made himself scarce enough this day. Go fetch him and tell him that he’s to wait upon me in my study.”

Mr. Lyttle’s face crumpled in misery. “I canna do that. Mr. Farquhar doesna leave his chamber during the day.”

“Then by all means, lead us to his chamber. It’s time he and I had this out,” Alex thundered. “I’m done tolerating servants who only serve when it suits them.”

Mr. Lyttle rumpled the handkerchief into a wrinkled ball. Then he suddenly straightened his spine and looked Alex in the eye. “O’ course, ’tis no’ my place to say so, milord, but there’s no another soul in Bonniebroch that serves the estate and its people as much as has our Mr. Farquhar.”

“He just doesn’t serve its laird,” Alex said, stone-faced.

“I’m sure he didna mean to offend ye.” Mr. Lyttle’s meager store of courage deserted him and his shoulders slumped once more. “If it so please ye, follow me and I’ll take ye to him. ’Tis near sundown, in any case.”

All the talk of sundown and how Mr. Farquhar didn’t venture out during the day made Lucinda wonder suddenly if their steward was a vampyre, like the strange creature from the legend of the Monk of Melrose Abbey. She suppressed a shudder as she and Alexander trailed Mr. Lyttle out of the library.

 

 

The butler led them back down to the ground level of the Great Hall and across the bailey to the round tower from which Bonniebroch took its name. When they reached the base of the tower, Mr. Lyttle took a large iron key from his pocket and opened the reinforced door.

A tickle of unease settled between Alexander’s shoulder blades and he wished he could have persuaded Lucinda to leave this to him. True to form, she wouldn’t let this mystery go without seeing it to its end.

“Mind how ye go,” Lyttle said softly as he stepped aside to allow them to pass. Then he followed them in and relocked the door behind them. “No one comes into the tower but me, ye ken,” he said in answer to Alexander’s unspoken question.

“And Mr. Farquhar, one presumes.”

“Oh, aye, he comes and goes as he will,” Lyttle said as he lit a lantern and began to mount the narrow stone stairs that curved around the outer wall. The ceiling soared some fifty feet above their heads. At intervals, the dark remains of wooden beams jutted out from the gray stone. “In times past, there were several levels between the ground floor and the topmost. Back then, there were no stairs. Defenders would use ladders and pull them up after themselves at need.”

“And you know this because . . .”

“Because I was there, milord,” Lyttle said simply. “Mr. Farquhar will explain it all. In the meantime, do ye take care. Hug the wall, my lady. ’Tis a long drop and no rail to stop ye.”

“Stay close,” Alex whispered to Lucinda. He fell in behind Lyttle, but reached behind him with his left hand so he could hold Lucinda’s.

They followed the butler up the round tower till the staircase dead-ended at a door. Here, instead of using a key, the butler made a series of stylized movements in the air before the latch.

“What are you doing?” Alex demanded.

“There’s no key for this lock. The tower keep is warded with a charm,” Lyttle said as if using magic were as natural as serving clotted cream with bread. Golden shimmers, like dust motes caught in a spoke of sunlight, trailed behind the butler’s fingertips, leaving a clearly discernible pattern in the air. The pattern glowed red-hot then faded. Then, even though Mr. Lyttle hadn’t touched the door, Alexander heard the latch give with a snick. Mr. Lyttle pushed it open and bowed from the neck to indicate that they should precede him into the chamber.

Alex pushed past him into the round room. It was lit by the light of a single candle, though narrow slabs of daylight sliced through the western arrow loops. The room was sparsely furnished. In addition to a bookshelf stacked with hide-bound ledgers, there was only a standing full-length mirror and a desk with a single chair.

Callum Farquhar was seated behind the desk, scratching away with a long-plumed quill. In the fading light, he seemed faded as well, as if he were no more substantial than a breath. He glanced up from his work, then back to the parchment to finish the sentence he’d been writing. Once he signed his name with a flourish, the steward laid aside his writing implements. He rose and sketched an elaborate bow to Lucinda.

Alex frowned at the steward.

“Someone left out the book with—”

“A presence?” Alex said. “What are you talking about?” He silently added,
“And while we’re at it, why can I hear you when your lips aren’t moving?”

“Och, that’s because I’m incorporeal,”
Farquhar answered as though he’d heard Alex’s thoughts.
“I can make my voice heard by normal means but ’tis a great deal of trouble. Mind-speech is much more efficient for my kind.”

“Your kind?”

Alex turned to Lucy.

“He’s a spirit, Alexander. A ghost.”

Farquhar clapped his hands but it made no sound.
“Brava. Tell him how ye know this.”

“The presence Mr. Farquhar sensed is
my
ghost. His name is Brodie MacIver and he’s been with me since I was a wee lass,” Lucinda said.

“You have a ghost?” What other secrets did his bride hide from him?

She nodded. “I didna tell ye because I thought ye’d believe me daft. Brodie is why I never had a beau before ye. He ran off every lad who tried to court me.”

Alex’s mouth twitched in a smile. “I think I like this Brodie MacIver.”

“He’s beginning to like ye, too. A bit.”

Alexander glanced back at Mr. Lyttle, who was standing sentinel at the door. “So, is everyone in Bonniebroch a ghost? That would account for the strange reputation of the place.”

“Nae, they’re all as much flesh and blood as ye and yer good lady.”
Farquhar’s bushy eyebrows drew together.
“But they’re cursed.”

“How so?”

“Mr. Lyttle was indeed born in 1489, just as the genealogy chart says.”
Farquhar drifted across the room, his movements mimicking walking, but with his feet a few inches above the thick slats of the floor.
“But he’s been stuck where he is now since 1521.”

“Stuck?” Alex and Lucinda said in unison.

“Aye,” Mr. Lyttle said from his post at the door. “That’s when the curse caused the change to happen and all the folk at Bonniebroch stopped aging.”

“So everyone in the castle is over three hundred years old?” Alex asked.

“The children too?” Lucinda asked.

Mr. Farquhar nodded.

“Three hundred years to practice and that boy still hasn’t learned to play the pipes,” Alexander muttered.

Farquhar chuckled.
“Aye, but ye must give him high marks for persistence.”

“I still dinna understand. How is it a curse not to grow older?” Lucinda asked.

“Ye’d think it might be the opposite, would ye no’?” Mr. Lyttle said. “I confess we all thought so ourselves for the first seventy or eighty years. Then it grew tiresome for the folk to try to explain themselves when they traveled to Edinburgh to trade or simply went to market in the nearest village. We hadn’t aged a day and that marked us as peculiar. People dinna trust those who are different and we are that. The last time one of us went abroad in the world, the villagers were so leery, it nearly came to a burning for witchcraft.”

“So the folk of Bonniebroch learned to keep to themselves,”
Farquhar said.

“Then other problems became apparent,” Mr. Lyttle said. “The children didna grow up. They no’ only didna age physically, they didna grow up on the inside either. They didna learn anything new. And poor Meg Liscombe! She was with child when the change happened and she’s been big-bellied all these years, expecting a bairn that willna be born.”

“When folk get stuck, there’s trouble at the other end of life as well,”
Farquhar said.

“After a couple hundred years, those who were older to start with began to realize they had no heaven to look forward to,” Mr. Lyttle said. “My mother-in-law reminds me often that ’tis no great blessing to wake day after day as the ages roll by with aching joints and dim eyesight and no’ enough teeth to do damage to more than a bowl of parritch. She’s weary to her bones and has no hope of real rest.”

“Brodie MacIver says there are things worse than death,” Lucinda said. “And I suppose a ghost should know.”

“And being stuck means even those in the prime of life dinna grow and change as they ought. Some of the husbands and wives who might have mellowed into comfortable old age together became tetchy when neither of them moved on. They may have the years, but the wisdom that should have come with them isna there,”
Farquhar explained.
“If a fellow willna listen to his wife of thirty years, imagine her frustration when she’s wed to the lout for three hundred and thirty.”

“I always listen to Mrs. Lyttle,” the butler piped up.

“For which, I’m sure Mrs. Lyttle is grateful.”
Farquhar hefted a ledger book and levitated it above his hands till it came to rest upon the desktop. He waved his hand and the pages flipped until the book fell open to the last entry.
“On a positive note, ye’ll find the accounts of the estate in excellent condition, milord. Three hundred years of accumulated interest will do wonders for a balance sheet.”

Alex strode over and inspected the ledger. His eyes flared in surprise. “My Lord, we’re rich as Croesus.”

“Will this curse affect us—Lady Bonniebroch and me?” Alexander asked.

“Nae. It’ll no’ touch either of ye. We’ve had many lairds over the years. Some for their whole life long. Others for only a bit. But none of them was troubled by the curse. They grew older and wiser and eventually went on to their reward.”
Farquhar shrugged eloquently.
“O’ course, a few simply went on.”

“Did Sir Darren MacMartin know about all this?”