“Where will you sleep?” she heard herself asking.
He shrugged.
Isobel went to the window and stood beside him. Below them the choppy gray sea stretched away for miles. Two islands were visible in the distance.
“Why do you resist all this? You are heir to it…why do you stay away? Your Father clearly longs to give it to you.”
“Colin can do it. Father threatened to name him tanist, but he hasn’t yet. If Father would just do it, Colin could stop hating me.”
Isobel frowned, thinking about his words and how they contradicted his actions. He’d gone out of his way to antagonize Colin. He’d behaved forcefully to his father—in a way that commanded respect from Dougal Kilpatrick. Isobel could see why Dougal persisted. Philip would be an excellent leader. If he really didn’t want to be chieftain, why then did he behave so?
“Is that what you’re waiting for? Someone to take the decision out of your hands?”
He turned to face her, his brow furrowed. “What?”
“I won’t pretend to understand you or your family, but it seems as if you resist your role as heir apparent not because you don’t want to do it, but because you think you can’t. Or shouldn’t.”
He said nothing, staring down at her, his expression odd. After a moment he turned his head, looking out the window again, his fingers tapping thoughtfully against the stone sill. “Have I mentioned that you frighten me?”
“I think you might have.”
His smile was thin. “It bears repeating.” He turned away from the window, his dark eyes shot with amber and unfathomable. “Come, let’s see if we can’t find something of my sister’s so we canfinally get you home.”
Chapter 11
Isobel rested on the bed in the small room as Philip tore it apart, looking for anything that retained something of his sister. She watched him, her heart heavy. She wasn’t quite certain what to attribute her depression to. Everything she touched that belonged to the child was saturated with someone else’s thoughts and feelings. Mairi Kilpatrick and her deep, relentless grief. Some of it was old—the heartbreak of a mother who lost her only beloved child—and some of it was fresh, as if the child had just disappeared. Mairi still came to this room and touched her daughter’s things, held them, cried over them. Sometimes raged over them—furious at Philip for losing the only thing she loved, furious at her husband for caring more about Philip than their lost daughter.
In this room, Philip’s stepmother had even contemplated suicide, had sat with poison gripped in her fist—brought the cup to her lips—before hurling it across the room. Isobel could not tell Philip the things she saw, and yet it broke her heart to see the hope she had put in his eyes dim each time he came to her with something new, something he’d found buried in the bottom of a chest, certain thatthis timeit was untouched. And when she touched it, she felt nothing but Mairi’s heartbreak and bitterness. The despair was so thick there was nothing of the child left.
Each time she told him that she saw nothing of his sister, she took away what she had given him.Hope.And she hated herself for it.
Isobel lay back against the bolster, closing her eyes to block out the sight of him as he shoved a stack of books and trinkets off a cupboard, sending them crashing to the floor. Her heart ached. It was rarely this difficult. But she hadn’t anticipated his stepmother. Isobel had felt other’s grief so that it broke her own heart, but she’d never felt anything like this before. She placed her palms against the embroidered quilt she lay upon and felt Mairi. She’d lain here, on this very bed, and cried—screamed even. The servants stayed away when she came here, afraid of the state she worked herself into.
The bed creaked and moved as Philip sat on it. Isobel turned her head and opened her eyes. He sat at the end, elbows braced on knees and head in hands.
“That’s it,” he said. “That’s everything. I can think of nothing else.”
Isobel had told him she would help him. She felt like a liar, a cheat, a charlatan.
“I’m so sorry, Philip.”
“I don’t understand,” he said to the floor. “It seems so easy with everything else you touch.” He straightened, twisting to pin her with an accusing stare. “The Kennedys—hadn’t the girl’s mother been holding the handkerchief for days?”
“That’s because it was only for a few days. Laurie had owned the handkerchief much longer than Heather had held it. And Heather’s emotions had not yet become so powerful that they saturated the handkerchief…not like this…”
“My stepmother is all you feel when you touch Effie’s things? Can you not dig deeper? Get beneath Mairi? Effiemustbe there somewhere.”
It was sometimes like that, but she was strangely reluctant to go that far, that deep. She feared she wouldn’t find Effie at all, but something even more unpleasant about Mairi Kilpatrick. However, she’d never been one to shirk from duty, and she wouldn’t start now.
She sat up. It seemed there was a weight around her, dragging her down. She was exhausted, filled with leaden sadness.
She scanned the room, looking for the doll she’d held earlier. “That—bring me the doll.”
Philip was off the bed, fetching the doll to her. It had a leather head and body, its painted face faded. The clothes were new—which disturbed Isobel inexplicably. In her mind she’d clearly witnessed Mairi painstakingly sew and embroider new clothes for the doll years after Effie disappeared.
Philip started to hand it to her, then drew back, frowning. “You look faint.”
Isobel squared her shoulders and forced a smile. “I’m fine.”
