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“Why would you assume otherwise?” She tried not to bristle, but why did he even care?
His eyebrows ticked up. “I’m simply trying to make conversation to pass the tedium of the journey.”
She winced. Clearly, her nerves were getting the best of her. “I apologize, sir. I suppose I’ve fallen out of the habit of polite conversation.”
He regarded her with a softer eye. “Carmelites observe the Great Silence, do they not?”
Donella was surprised he would know such an arcane detail. “Outside of chapel or meals, we observed silence. Only in the most pressing of circumstances did we break it.”
“Did you like it, all that quiet?”
She thought about it for a few moments. “I grew up in a noisy family, and there was a great deal of clan business taking place and visitors coming and going at the castle. The quiet was something of a relief.”
In particular, Donella’s mother had dragged chaos in her wake, making life a trial. But family history was certainly not something to share with a stranger—or anyone.
“Right,” Kendrick said. “Your uncle is a clan chieftain, I believe. The Haddons are one of the larger Sept families in Clan Graham.”
She’d almost forgotten how nice it was to talk to a true Highlander. Few people understood the complicated and sometimes-frustrating tangle of relationships and clan ties.
“Malcolm Haddon, one of my father’s brothers, is the current chief. And Lord Riddick, my great-uncle, is heavily involved in clan business. Gatherings were held at least once a year when I was growing up, and there were always celebrations around holidays and marriages. It was quite . . . lively.”
“That’s one way to describe the gathering of the clan,” he replied. “Barely controlled mayhem would be more accurate.”
“It sounds like you didn’t much care for them, either.”
He gave a small shrug, a shifting of those impressive shoulders. “I did when I was young. What lad wouldn’t be fond of drinking, feasting, and dancing with pretty Highland lasses?”
She didn’t think she imagined the hint of self-mockery in his tone. “What changed for you, then?”
His sudden smile was charming—and insincere. “Nothing changed. I simply grew older and wiser. So, you enjoyed your peaceful life in the convent, did you? Coming from a large and noisy family myself, I can almost envy such a thing.”
Donella recognized the polite dodge. “I didn’t always enjoy it. The silence, I mean.”
“Why not?”
“It was too quiet sometimes. You could practically hear a fly crawling across a windowpane or the stones of the building settling into the ground. At night, you might think you were entirely alone, with not another soul in the world.” The memories of her cloistered life rose before her, poignant, complicated, and as painful as one’s first love.
“Sometimes I imagined I could hear voices from the graveyard, calling to me from under the earth,” she murmured, almost to herself.
Then she actually registered those words and heat flooded her face. “And now Idosound like a character from one of those lurid tales.” She gave an embarrassed chuckle. “How silly of me.”
In fact, she sounded mentally unhinged like her—
Donella slammed the door on that thought.
Kendrick simply raised an eyebrow. “Ah, so thereweremad monks and shrieking apparitions wandering about the place. You’ve been holding out on me, Miss Haddon.”
“It was a convent, Mr. Kendrick, not a monastery. No monks of any sort. Or apparitions. Reverend Mother wouldn’t allow it.”
He grinned. “I do hope the cemetery was at least appropriately gothic, with morose angels leaning sideways over crumbling gravestones.”
His smile was so likable it was hard not to return it. Logan Kendrick could exude charm as easily as whisky flowed from a bottle. Fortunately, she was immune to that sort of thing.
“Nothing of the sort, I’m afraid. The previous owner kindly donated the manor house and grounds to the church when he built a new mansion near Edinburgh. Many generations of his family are buried on the grounds, so he stipulated that the sisters must maintain the graves as long as we remained in residence. My room overlooked the oldest part of the cemetery.” She flashed a wry smile. “When the wind blew through the trees on a stormy night, it felt like the dead were whispering to each other, moaning from beyond the grave.”
“Can’t say that I blame the poor devils. Must get rather boring down there in a moldy old box.”
“You do realize that the souls of the dead are long departed. It’s only dust and bones in the ground.”
