Page 33 of Lady Len and the Mysterious Mac

“Is my cooking not up to Aberdeen standards, then?”

“Dinna fash. I never ate so well in Aberdeen as I did here. Only I’m not hungry just now.”

“Silas MacKenzie, not hungry? That’s a first. You’ll waste away like your father if you don’t eat.”

“Has it been sudden?” he asked, realizing she might have noticed his father’s decline more than anyone else.

Now it was her turn to shake her head. “Says he was fine abroad, but I thought him mighty thin. Though he was more robust when he first graced the doorstep.”

“Why did no one bother to inform me?”

Her mouth was a flat line until she said, “Himself insisted you be left alone to come back on your own like he did.”

It was like a dirk directly into his side, knowing he’d been kept in the dark like a child too young to know the truth.

“Had I been here, I might have done something to help.” He knew his voice sounded pitiful and small. It begged the question, What could you have possibly done to help? But Morag Kynoch had never been one for tears or sympathy.

“You’re here now,” she said simply.

It wasn’t even a kindness. They both knew she meant the unasked question, So what are you going to do about it?

“What does he need?”

“It’s not my place, milord.”

“What,” he said again, grabbing her mixing bowl to stop her turning away, “does he need?”

She eyed him cautiously and shook her head. “For you to do your duty.”

It was another blow to the belly, and then with a right cross to the jaw she added, “And let him go in peace.” Her eyes looked sad, and a little bit angry.

Si released her bowl and let her turn away, and she moved to a counter where Dorrie waited on a stool to roll the dough into new bannocks. He was in the way, taking up too much space in the small kitchen.

“I need to find my wife,” he said.

Dorrie looked up at her grandmother but was shushed and instructed to keep her eyes on her work.

Thus dismissed, he returned outside to search the jungle of a garden for Ellen. He was still out there, contemplating a chain of wisteria that climbed the castle wall, as though she could be hiding in the purple flowers, when there came a little tug at his kilt. He looked down to see the child staring up at him with wide green eyes.

“Dorrie?”

“I’m to gather rosemary, milord.”

“No herbs over here.”

“No, milord.” She looked around and then whispered, “Do you believe in ghosts?”

An oddly perceptive question to ask, when the spirit of his mother loomed over the old garden as surely as the wisteria did.

“Maybe I do. Have you seen one?”

“No milord.”

“No, me neither,” he said with a sigh.

“But I ken I heard one crying in the chapel earlier.”

Of course. He should have searched that desolate corner straight away. It made some kind of sense the lass might hide there, the last refuge of the forsaken.