Wynda Ramsay yawned.
“How charming!” cried Janet Reid, and flung herself off her horse with such gusto that Alasdair Penhallow just barely had time to catch her, and help set her feet, in scarlet morocco slippers, onto the ground.
Two dimples peeped on alabaster cheeks as she smiled up at him. “Oh, thank you, laird! What are we going to see first?”
“The lower two levels only,” he answered, “as the upper ones may not be safe.”
“Is there a dungeon? I would love to see a dungeon! Chains, and pincers, and all manner of nasty things!” Janet gave a dramatic shudder which set her emerald ear-bobs flashing in the sun.
Fiona couldn’t help it. She just couldn’t. She said chattily: “Yes, for our ancient monks are renowned for their cruel practices toward the worshippers they’d so often throw into their dungeons, aren’t they? And on the slightest of pretexts, too! A late arrival to services, a misspoken verse from a hymnal, and so on. I expect,” she added to Alasdair Penhallow, “the Keep’s dungeon has the customary walls that drip, bloodstains on the floor, bones scattered about, and rats?”
Mairi emitted a little shriek of horror and clutched at her father’s hand, Janet gave Fiona a hard look of dislike, and Alasdair Penhallow laughed.
“Alas, there’s no dungeon. I spent many a night as a lad camping up here with friends, and how we’d have rejoiced in such a thing! We had to satisfy ourselves with ghost stories, though, and the occasional brick falling down as we slept, scaring us out of our wits.”
Janet moved to Alasdair Penhallow’s side and slid her hand around his arm. “I’d be so frightened to do something like that! Unless I had someone to protect me, of course, and then I’d simply love it.”
Goaded beyond endurance, Fiona said: “As long as a brick didn’t fall on your head.”
“Shall we move on?” Janet sidled closer to Alasdair Penhallow, pointedly ignoring Fiona’s remark, and Fiona had just enough time to see the laughter fade from Alasdair’s eyes and into them come a somber, faraway look, as if he’d just remembered something that caused him pain—and then that expression vanished, he smiled down at Janet, and they both turned away.
Everyone dutifully followed in the laird’s wake and it took what little forbearance Fiona had left to remain silent when the subject of hermits came up and was animatedly discussed for a full half-hour; when Mairi (who felt a little dizzy looking down the twisting stone staircase) claimed Alasdair’s arm and crept along with such hesitancy that it took another half-hour for the group to finally convene on the ground floor; when, as they went outside to a pleasant sunny spot where the servants had laid down blankets and set out all the inviting elements of a picnic, Wynda, predictably, exclaimed:
“Dining on pleen air! Comment enshantee! And so fashionable! One might even fancy oneself at the Regent’s Park! That’s in London, you know,” she explained kindly.
“You are a veritable fount of information, Miss Ramsay.” Janet Reid, her face alight with mischief, sank gracefully onto one of the blankets.
“Merci,” said Wynda, as one benevolently acknowledging a compliment from a pitiful ignoramus.
“Yes, a fount.” Janet burst out laughing, and accepted from one of the servants a tall crystal flute of champagne.
Fiona sat by herself on a blanket at the furthest edge of the group, and proceeded to peacefully enjoy some very nice ham sandwiches as well as a generous serving of strawberries and two thick delicious slices of a fruit cake densely studded with almonds, currants, and raisins.
“My!” Janet Reid commented sweetly from afar. “You have quite the appetite, don’t you, dear Miss Douglass? And yet you’re so very slim! One might almost call you skeletal! I wonder, really, if you might not have a tapeworm.”
“Very possibly,” Fiona replied affably, and helped herself to a large wedge of buttery golden shortbread.
“I suppose,” Janet went on, a little less sweetly, “you’re sorry not to see haggis today, or the offal pot. Aren’t those the traditional dishes you Highlanders love to eat?”
Fiona wavered within herself. Mind your tongue, rise above. Her resolution held for exactly three seconds and then she said:
“Oh, dear me, no, Miss Reid. You mistake us for a clan that actually cooks its food. We normally eat our food raw. Why, we snatch the fish from Wick Bay with our bare hands, and eat it just like that, barefooted on the beach. Head, skin, guts, and tail. Still wiggling. Yes, it’s a simpler life we lead in the wilds of the north.” Reflectively she concluded, “I daresay that’s where we get the tapeworms from. Eating live fish. Or perhaps it’s the carrion. So hard to resist.”