“Everything still on yir own terms, I see.” He shouldered the heavy front door open and they stepped into the Great Hall, which smelled of cut greens and ancient stone, like the chapel. Harald and Burtie were in the study, tumblers in hand and feet to the grate. Firelight glinted in the glass eyes of mounted wildebeest and kudu heads and cast corkscrew shadows onto the coffered ceiling.
“Help yourselves,” Harald said, no hint of welcome in his tone, and waved toward the drinks trolley.
They had no sooner selected their single malts—Laphroaig for Els, Glenmorangie for Mallo—when Harald stood up and said, “Past my bedtime. Mrs. Burton, may I escort you to your chambers?” He led Burtie out of the room, and Els smiled to think he was still pretending that Burtie slept in the third-floor suite given to her and three-year-old Malcolm when they first arrived. She imagined all the padding down the servants’ stairs in the middle of the night and trysts in the hunter’s bothy up in the hills. It was oddly erotic to think of their clandestine coupling happening right under everyone’s noses.
Burtie pushed out of her chair, set her unfinished drink on the trolley, and looked at her son. “I’ll see ye tomorrow, then?”
Mallo kissed her cheek. “If it fits in with yir obligations here, I’ll fetch ye for tea in the village.”
“That’d be grand,” Burtie said. She looked at Els and Mallo appraisingly. “Ye’ve a lot a’ catching up to do.” She followed Harald into the Great Hall.
While they sat in the wing chairs with their feet to the fire, Mallo drew out Els’s stories of the cutthroat world of New York mergers and acquisitions, which she embellished only enough to make him laugh. In the childhood tales they’d invented, the hero was always a boy, and she reveled now in being the one carrying the sword and slaying the dragons. He sat back and looked at her as if she was a font of enchantment; she was touched, and a little embarrassed, by the intensity of his listening.
“Ye’ve become the son Sir Harald never had,” Mallo said, swirling his neat scotch.
“That should’ve been you,” she said.
He stared into the fire. “At most, I’d have been a decently paid employee, smart on husbandry, lining his coffers,” he said. “Surely ye’ve discovered for yourself that taking his money comes at a price.” He stood and went to pour them both more scotch. When he returned her tumbler, their fingers on the crystal close but not touching, he held her gaze. She wouldn’t let herself be the first to look away.
“The future—yours, mine . . . ours . . . Scotland’s—lies in breaking from his way,” he said. Excitement crept into his eyes, but he didn’t smile. “I’m beginning to believe I’ve a chance in the election.”
She took the glass from him. “Other than loving you as long as I can remember, tell me why I should vote for you.”
“That’s reason enough for Mum,” he said, and flashed that grin again. “But ye’ve always been a far tougher nut than she.”
For the next few hours, sitting on the edge of his chair, he countered her every argument against devolution for Scotland, challenging her to form her own opinions and step out of the Laird’s shadow, and by the time they called a truce, she was more than a little swayed. When the case clock bonged three o’clock, its chime echoing through the silent house, Mallo rose to leave. He draped his arm around her shoulder and walked her through the scullery to the servants’ door. As intimate as they’d been when children, she found the closeness of this tall, impassioned semi-stranger brand-new and unsettling.
“Come to Stonehaven for Hogmanay,” he said. “I’ve got friends who can put us up.”
“It’s nothing but a sing-along and booze-up.”
“Nah, not if we don’t want it to be,” he said. “Yi can’t go back across the pond without bringing the New Year in with kin and seeing the fireballs.”
In the dusting of snow that had fallen, the footprints of a fox crossed the drive.
“Promise you’ll protect me from those hooligans?”
“On my honor as your sworn knight,” he said, and made their secret sign.
She returned it solemnly, wondering if there was fealty, irony, rebellion, or mere teasing in his mention of their childhood games and difference in station.