A Winter Wedding: Strangers at the Altar / The Warrior's Winter Bride

‘You mean you want to kiss me because it is illicit?’

‘Oh, no, I want to kiss you because you have a mouth that makes me think of kissing. But perhaps it’s so difficult not to because I know it’s not permitted, even though we’re married.’ Innes shook his head and jumped to his feet. ‘I don’t know. Maybe we should check the armoury for a chastity belt.’

‘Maybe we should stop worrying about it, and discussing it and analysing it,’ Ainsley said. ‘We are adults. We are neither of us interested in becoming attached. There is no harm in us having some—some fun.’

‘Fun? You say that as if you are taking a dose of Mr Rush’s patented pills for biliousness.’

‘I am sure that they too are healthful.’

Innes burst out laughing. ‘You say the strangest things. Healthful! It’s the first time I’ve heard it referred to in that way.’

‘You think it’s an inaccurate term to use?’

She was frowning, looking genuinely puzzled, just as she had yesterday, now he thought about it, when she’d mentioned—what was it—marital relations? ‘I think it’s best if we think about something else entirely,’ Innes said. ‘Delightful as this breakfast has been, the day is getting away from us. First things first, we’ll start with a tour of the castle. I warn you, it’s a great barrack of a place and like to be as cold as an icehouse.’

Ainsley got to her feet. ‘I’ll go and fetch a shawl.’

The door closed behind her. Innes gazed out of the window, though the view was almost entirely obscured by an overgrown hedge. It looked as if it had not been cut for a good many years. Like everything he’d seen at Strone Bridge so far, from the jetty to the stables, it was neglected. Eoin had warned him that things had changed. He wondered, if the state of the house and grounds were anything to go by, what had happened to the lands. He was surprised, for though his father had been old-fashioned, archaic even in his practices, he had never been negligent. He was also angry, though guiltily aware he had little right to be so. These were Malcolm’s lands. If Malcolm was here, he would be appalled at the state of them. Yet if Malcolm were here, Innes would not be. If Malcolm was here, he would not have allowed the place to fall into decline, and Innes...

He cursed. He could go round in circles for ever with that logic. He was not looking forward to this tour of the castle. It wasn’t so much the state of disrepair he was now certain he’d find in the rooms, it was the history in those rooms, all his history. He didn’t want anyone to see him coping—or not coping—with that history, and Ainsley was a very astute observer. It had been fourteen years. Surely that was long enough for him to at least put on a show of disaffection. Yet here he was, feeling distinctly edgy and wondering how to explain it away.

The castle was just a building. A heap of stones and wood of dubious aesthetic value. There was no ancient law that said he must live there if he chose to remain on Strone Bridge after a year, which was highly unlikely. No, he would have the Home Farm made more comfortable, because nothing would persuade him to play the laird in the castle, not even for a few weeks.

The vehemence of this thought took Innes so aback he did not notice Ainsley had returned until she spoke his name. ‘Right,’ Innes said, sounding appropriately businesslike. ‘Let’s get on with it.’

Chapter Four (#u9fb7ab2a-420a-57fd-8a18-126f472776c9)

The sun shone weakly from a pale blue sky dotted with puffy clouds, the kind a child would paint. Following in Innes’s wake along the narrow path of damp paving slabs, Ainsley could see that the gloom inside the Home Farm’s lower rooms was largely due to the height of the untended hedge. Emerging through an extremely overgrown arch, she came face-to-face with Strone Bridge Castle for the first time.

They were standing at the side of a long sweep of carriageway with what must have been a huge lawn on either side, though at present it was more like the remnants of a hayfield, part long yellowed grass falling over, part fresh green pushing through. The building loomed over them, such an imposing structure she could not imagine how she had missed its hulk yesterday, though the stone was indeed the grey colour the sky had been.

Ainsley walked backwards to gain some perspective. ‘This is the rear of the house,’ Innes said. ‘The drive meets the main overland road, which cuts over to the other side of the peninsula and Loch Fyne, though to call it a road... It’s far easier to travel by boat in this neck of the woods.’

‘We did not come this way yesterday?’

He shook his head. ‘The front of the house faces down to the shore. We came up that way. I’ll show you, we’ll go in by the main entrance, but I wanted you to see the scale of this damned monstrosity first.’

Strone Bridge Castle was indeed enormous, and though it was not precisely charming, Ainsley would not have called it a monstrosity. An imposing construction with a large tower at each corner, and another central turret projecting from the middle of the main building, it was like a castle from a Gothic novel. The sturdy turrets had unexpected ogee roofs, adding a hint of the east into the architectural mix, each roof topped with tall spires and embellished with slit windows. The turrets looked, with their rugged masonry walls and stolid, defensive air, quite at odds with the central part of the building, which was considerably more elegant, mostly Jacobean in style, with four storeys of tall French-style windows, a low Palladian roof ornamented with a stone balustrade and a huge portico that looked as if it had been added on as an afterthought. The overall effect was certainly not of beauty, but it was striking.

‘It looks,’ Ainsley said, studying it with bemusement, ‘as if someone has jumbled up three or four different houses, or taken samples from a book of architectural styles through the ages.’

‘You’re not far off,’ Innes said. ‘The main house was built about 1700. The roof and that central tower were added about fifty or sixty years after that, and my own father put those corner towers up. There’s no rhyme nor reason to it. As I said, it’s a monstrosity.’

‘That’s not what I meant at all. It is like nothing I have ever seen.’

‘One of a kind. That, thank heavens, is certainly true,’ Innes said grimly.

‘You are not fond of it, then?’ Ainsley asked. ‘Though there must be some interesting stories attached to a building so old. And perhaps even a few ghosts.’

He had taken her arm as they made their way over the untended lawn around the building, and now slanted her a curious look. ‘Do you believe in such things?’

‘Honestly, I’ve never considered the question before, but looking at this place, I could easily be persuaded.’

‘There is a tale of one of the lairds who went off to fight in the 1715 Jacobite uprising. He was for the Old Pretender. There’s a set of gates, right at the end of the carriageway, which he had locked, so they say, and made his wife promise never to unlock them until his return.’

‘What happened?’

‘He died in the Battle of Sheriffmuir. His wife had the gates unlocked for his corpse to pass through in its coffin, but—’ Innes broke off, shaking his head. ‘No, there’s enough here already to give you nightmares without adding a walking, wailing, clanking ghost to the mix.’

Ainsley stopped in her tracks, looking up at him in horror. ‘Walking and wailing and clanking?’

He bent down to whisper in her ear. ‘He rattles the chain that should have been kept around the gates. He walks just over there, on the carriageway. He wails for the treachery of his lady wife, who married his enemy less than a year after he was slain.’

She shuddered, looked over to where he was pointing, then looked back at him. ‘Have you actually seen him?’ Innes made a noncommittal noise. Ainsley narrowed her eyes suspiciously. ‘Has anyone ever seen him?’

‘None who have lived to tell the tale,’ he answered sorrowfully.

She punched him on the arm. ‘Then how can the tale be told! You made that up.’

He laughed, rubbing his arm. ‘Not all of it. The first part was true. The laird at the time did fight, he did die at Sheriffmuir and he did have the gates locked.’

‘Are there any real ghosts?’

His laughter faded as he took her arm and urged her on. ‘Plenty, believe me, though none that you will see, I hope.’

His expression was one she recognised. Don’t ask. Not because she wouldn’t like the answers, but because he would not. This was his home, this place that he was mocking and deriding, this place that he called a monstrosity. She wondered, then, if he really meant the bricks and mortar. Yesterday it was obvious that Innes had not wanted to come back to Strone Bridge. It was equally obvious from this morning that he’d not expected the place to be in such a state of disrepair, but now she wondered what else there was to disturb him here. What was at the heart of the quarrel that had so completely estranged him from his father?

How little of Innes she knew. His formative years had been spent here, yet he had left all of it behind without, it seemed, a backward glance, to make a new and very different life for himself. Why? It was all very well to tell herself it was none of her business, but—no, there was no but. It was absolutely none of her business, Ainsley told herself rather unconvincingly. Yet it was strange, and very distractingly intriguing, like the man himself.

‘You were a million miles away. I was only teasing you about the ghosts. I didn’t mean to give you the jitters,’ Innes said, cutting in on her thoughts.

‘You didn’t.’ Ainsley looked around her with slight surprise. They had reached the front of the house, and the prospect was stunning, for it sat on a hill directly above the bay where they had landed yesterday. ‘My goodness, this is absolutely beautiful.’

‘That’s the Kyles of Bute over there, the stretch of water with all the small islands that you sailed yesterday,’ Innes said. ‘And over there, the crescent of sand you can see, that’s Ettrick Bay on Bute, the other side of the island from which we set sail. And that bigger island you can just see in the distance, that’s Arran.’

‘I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a wonderful prospect. It is exactly the sort of view that one conjures up, all misty-eyed, when one thinks of the Highlands. Like something from one of Mr Walter Scott’s novels.’

‘Aye, well, strictly speaking Eoin was right in what he said yesterday, though. We’re only a wee bit farther north than Glasgow here, and Arran is south.’

‘As the crow flies,’ Ainsley said. ‘It doesn’t matter, it feels like another world, and it really is quite spectacular. There must be a magnificent view from the castle.’ She looked back at the house, where a set of long French-style windows opened out on the first floor to what must have once been a beautiful terrace at the top of a flight of stairs.

‘That’s the drawing room,’ Innes said, following her gaze.

‘How lovely to take tea there on a summer’s day. I can just imagine the ladies of old with their hoops and their wigs,’ she said dreamily.

‘The hoops and wigs are like as not still packed away up in the attics somewhere. My family never throws anything away. Do you really like this place?’

‘It’s entrancing. Do you really not like it?’