A Very Highland Holiday - Kathryn Le Veque Page 0,42
features wobbled as she narrowed only one eye at her. “Well, no offense to yer countrymen, but after the battle at Culloden, the English were everywhere were they not? They stayed at the inn, to be sure, as it was sedition to deny them entry. But, they never found our secret spots, did they?” She tapped her head as if she’d thought of those secrets herself.
Vanessa perked up. “Secret spots?”
“Just so. Like Carrie Pitagowan’s Chamber of Sorrows.”
“Chamber of Sorrows?” Vanessa echoed. “Now that sounds deliciously ominous.”
Bess leaned closer, her chins wobbling in agreement. “Aye, Carrie worked beneath these old rafters during the days of Culloden. A saucy minx she was. Curious, like you. Always looking for something more.”
Vanessa winced. Was she that obvious?
Bess seemed not to notice, continuing with her story. “Carrie would go to Jacobite battlefields and strip the English soldiers of their treasure. It was about this time of year back then, another blizzard, another Na Fir Chlis when ’twas said she cursed that room. Warned all who would listen that a lion lived there and would devour any who stayed.”
Chills spilled over every part of Vanessa, and she took another bite just to distract herself from them.
Oblivious to her discomfiture, Bess continued, “Of course each new generation doesna believe in Carrie’s lion, but every time we try to let that room, the occupants are haunted right back out of it again.”
At this, Vanessa frowned. “Why let it to me, then?”
Bess cast her eyes down as she drew her fingernail through the pit in the wood of the bar. “I doona ken, lass, if ye want the honest truth. I couldna leave you out in the storm and…something told me the Chamber of Sorrows would welcome ye, and the lion with it.”
Vanessa swallowed the dry meat in a lump that made its uncomfortable way down her esophagus, and drank a long swallow of dark ale to force it down.
She could see Johnathan de Lohr as a lion. Fierce and golden haired. Not only a conqueror but commander, ruler of all he surveyed.
And well he knew it.
“Ye’ve known a bit of the longing that lives in that room, I wager.” Bess lowered her voice to the decibel of confidants. “And yer fair share of sorrow, too. Else why would ye be here alone what with Christmas bearing down on ye? If ye doona mind me asking, why’s yer family in Paris without ye?”
Her pitying look speared Vanessa through the ribs as she cast about for an answer. “Well I—”
“Tell me the young, cheap whisky isn’t making me see things, Priestly,” a nasally, masculine, British voice slurred with a bit of a lisp. “Tell me this isn’t little Vanessa Latimer, wot?”
Vanessa turned to see that the men who had been playing cards at the edge of the bar now crowded close around her, effectively trapping her onto the tall stool upon which she perched. They each had an empty glass in their hands, and the one who’d addressed her swayed, dangerously.
“By Jove.” His dark-haired friend—Priestly, she presumed—might have been passably handsome but for sporting a pathetic, thin mustache. He leered down at her from marble-dark eyes held way too close together. “I thought she looked familiar when she blew in, but she was in such a state of disarray I didn’t care to look at her. She cleans up rather well, though. I could almost believe she was respectable.”
“Yes,” the first one intoned, combing his hands through fair hair made greasy with too much pomade. The scent of it was nearly overpowering. “Quite respectable. But we know better, don’t we?”
The food turned to ashes in her mouth. Vanessa locked everything down just as she’d taught herself to when preparing for just one such encounter.
“Gentlemen,” she greeted soberly. “I don’t believe we’ve been introduced and, therefore, it is not polite to approach me thusly.”
Priestly’s eyebrows shot up. “My, aren’t we all grown up and putting on airs? What do you say to that, Gordie?”
Gordie’s watch chain gleamed as he leaned in obscenely close, his breath reeking of scotch. “We’ve heard tell you spend your time galivanting to exotic places. Learning, no doubt, exotic skills.”
Priestly all but tossed his glass to Bess. “I’d take a whisky, but not the kind that tastes like we’ve licked a peat bog. The good stuff you’re no doubt hiding back there. And I’ll make a bloody ruckus if you water it down.”
Vanessa let out an outraged breath, ashamed of her countrymen. “That’s beneath you, gentleman, talking