Read Chapter 10: An Uneasy Alliance

The rain came down in a thin, grey curtain over the estate as Eilidh stumbled through the kitchen door of the main house, her boots caked with mud from the long walk from Angus’s cottage. Morag, the housekeeper, looked up from the range, her face shifting from surprise to alarm at whatever she saw in Eilidh’s expression.

“Miss Grant? What is it? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

“Where’s Hamish?” Eilidh heard her own voice come out thin and reedy, not her own. “I need to find Hamish.”

Morag set down her tea towel and moved toward the back hallway. “He’s in the library. Hasn’t come out all morning. Should I—?”

But Eilidh was already past her, her wet boots squeaking on the flagstones. The door to the library was heavy oak, and she shoved it open without knocking.

Hamish stood by the great fireplace, a glass of whisky in his hand despite the hour, staring at a portrait above the mantel that Eilidh hadn’t noticed before—a stern-faced man in Highland dress, a dead stag at his feet. He turned slowly at the intrusion, and the irritation on his face died the moment he saw her.

“What’s happened?”

“It’s Angus.” The words caught in her throat. She pressed a hand to her chest, trying to steady the breath that had been ragged since she’d found him slumped against the potting shed wall. “The gardener. He… I found him. By the sheds. I think it was his heart. I tried, I called for help, but by the time I got back to him, he was already gone.”

Hamish set the glass down on the mantel with a precise, deliberate motion. His face didn’t change—that was the thing that struck her. No shock, no grief. Just a face that had gone perfectly still, like a loch before a storm.

“Are you sure?”

“He wasn’t breathing. His eyes were open. I’m sure.”

Hamish crossed the room, past her, into the hallway. For a moment she thought he was going to run to the cottage, to confirm it for himself. But he stopped at the threshold, his hand braced on the doorframe, his back to her.

“He was old,” he said quietly. “He’d been at Kintail since before I was born. He used to carry me on his shoulders down to the burns, showing me where the salmon spawned.”

The words came out flat, almost rote, as if he were reciting a well-worn memory he had no more use for. Eilidh stood in the middle of the library, dripping rainwater onto the Persian rug, and felt her anger rise—not at him, but at the cruelty of a world that let a kind man die alone behind a potting shed while his laird sipped whisky and stared at dead ancestors.

“He was trying to tell me something,” she said. She hadn’t meant to say it, but it came out anyway. “About Lady Finella. He knew things—things that have been erased from this family’s history. He was about to show me where to find proof, and then he just… fell.”

Hamish turned back to face her. Something flickered behind his eyes—something dark, defensive. “Angus was old and full of stories. The man believed in the fair folk and the hounds of the hill. You shouldn’t put too much stock in the ramblings of a dying—.”

“Don’t,” she cut him off, her voice sharp enough to slice glass. “Don’t you dare dismiss him like that. He was your family’s keeper of memory. He knew more about what happened in this place than you will ever glean from your ledgers and your locked doors.”

The accusation hung in the air between them. Hamish’s jaw tightened, but he didn’t fire back. Instead, he did something that disarmed her completely. He went to the sideboard and poured a second glass of whisky, then crossed the room and held it out to her.

“You look like you need this,” he said quietly.

She stared at his hand. The last time they had touched—briefly, accidentally, while rebuilding the fallen wall—an electric current had travelled up her arm that she had tried to convince herself was static, nothing more. Now his palm was open, offering, not demanding.

She took the glass.

The whisky burned its way down her throat and settled warm in her chest. She coughed once, then looked at him. “Morag will need to notify the family. He has a sister in Oban, I think. He mentioned her.”

Hamish nodded. “I’ll see to it. The funeral will be on the estate. He would have wanted that.”

A silence stretched between them, filled with the ticking of a grandfather clock and the hiss of rain against the window. Then Hamish spoke again, and his voice had lost its clipped, guarded quality, worn raw at the edges like old stone.

“I am the last of the MacKinnon line,” he said. “When I was a boy, my father used to tell me that the walls of Kintail had eyes—that every stone was placed by a MacKinnon hand, and they were all watching to see what I would make of their work.”

He laughed, a hollow sound. “I used to think he was being grand. Romantic. Now I know he was telling me the truth. I feel them, Grant. Every time I walk these halls, every time I let a year pass without the roof collapsing or the foundations sinking, I feel them. The weight of expectation. The judgement. I am what’s left of a thousand years of blood, and if I fail, it will not be a financial ruin that follows. It will be an extinction.”

Eilidh looked at him from across the room. The whisky glass was warm in her hands, and the firelight flickered over the sharp planes of his face, softening the lines of stress and suspicion. For the first time, she did not see the brooding laird who had slashed her drawings, nor the man who had caught her in the shadow of a forbidden doorway. She saw a boy, carried on the shoulders of a kind old gardener, who had grown up alone with only ghosts for company.

“I’m not your enemy,” she said quietly. “I never was. I’m just trying to do good work—honest work. The kind of work that respects what was built here, even the parts that are difficult to look at.”

He met her gaze, and something passed between them—a truce, fragile and unspoken, but there all the same. “The restoration should continue. You’re right—the castle needs it. I won’t stand in your way anymore.”

“And the east wing?”

His face closed over like a door slamming shut. “Remains off-limits. That is not negotiable.”

“Why?” She took a step toward him. “You said yourself the wing is deliberately unstable. No accident of time did that. Someone chose to make it dangerous. Someone chose to hide whatever is in there. Who was it that decided, Hamish? Your father? His father? Or is it you?”

The question hung between them, sharp-edged and dangerous. For a long moment she thought he would order her out, or storm off into the rain. Instead, he finished his whisky in a single swallow and set the glass down with a decisive click.

“I made a promise,” he said, so quietly she barely heard him over the rain. “A promise I cannot explain to you—not yet. But I would ask you to trust me when I say that what is in that wing will harm no one as long as it stays sealed. Let it lie, Grant. Please.”

The word *please* came from him like a hard-won concession, and it cracked something open inside her. She had been so sure he was hiding a family crime—a deliberate erasure of Lady Finella, a secret he was shamefully protecting. Now she saw that what he guarded was not a secret but a wound, one that he carried as a duty rather than a guilt.

“One thing,” she said. “Tell me one thing about her. About Finella. Not everything—just one true thing. So I know she wasn’t a legend.”

Hamish was silent. When he spoke, his voice was low. “She knew the truth,” he said. “Everyone in the family has known it since. She took it to whatever awaits beyond this world with her, because none of us ever had the courage to face what it meant.”

He left the room before she could ask what the truth was. The door clicked shut behind him, and Eilidh stood alone in the library, rain water still drying on her boots, whisky warm in her stomach, and an ache in her chest that she could no longer call annoyance or suspicion.

She had come to Kintail to restore a castle. Somewhere along the way, she was beginning to think she had been sent to restore the man who kept it.