A Christmas Letter: Snowbound in the Earl's Castle

She cleared her throat. ‘Does Bertie have a full title?’

He gave her the patronising kind of look that told her he thought she’d finally started asking sensible questions. ‘Albert Charles Baxter Huntington, seventh Duke of Hadsborough.’

Faith blinked slowly, trying to give nothing away.

Act like you knew that.

A duke? Gram had had a fling with a duke? She’d thought from the tone of the letter that he’d been a fellow academic or master craftsman working on a project. She hadn’t even considered that Bertie might own the window. And the building it inhabited. And this castle. And probably most of the land for miles around. Part of her was shocked at her conservative grandmother’s secret past. Another part wanted to punch the air and say, Go, Gram!

Faith’s throat was suddenly very dry. ‘And that would make you …?’

He frowned, then held out his hand, doing nothing to erase the horizontal lines that were bunching up his forehead. ‘Marcus Huntington—estate manager of Hadsborough Castle …’

Faith looked at his hand and swallowed. Hesitantly, she pulled her hand from her mitten and slid it into his. Since he hadn’t been wearing gloves she’d expected his skin to be ice-cold, but his grip was firm and his palm was warm against hers.

She looked down at their joined hands. This felt right. As if she remembered doing this before and had been waiting to do it again. Worse than that, she didn’t want to let go. She looked back up at him, hoping she didn’t look as panic-stricken as she felt. That was when her heart really started to thump.

He was staring at their hands, too. Then he looked up and his eyes met hers. She saw matching confusion and surprise in his expression.

He cleared his throat. ‘Bertie’s grandson and heir.’

Marcus pulled his hand away from hers, ignoring the pleasant ripple of sensation as her fingertips brushed his palm. Not the cliché of an electric shock racing up his arm. No, something far more unsettling—a sense of warmth, a sense of how right her hand felt in his. And that couldn’t be, because everything about this situation was wrong. She was not supposed to be here, trespassing on his family’s lives and stirring up trouble.

But it hadn’t been just the touch. It had started before that, when he’d caught her walking down by the lake. There was something about those small, understated features and those direct, reasonable brown eyes that totally caught him off guard.

And if there was one thing he hated it was being off guard.

However, when she’d slid her hand into his, and all the ear-pounding had stopped and his senses had calmed down and come to rest …

If anything that had been worse.

He couldn’t let himself fall into that trap again, so it was time to do something about it. Time to find out what Faith McKinnon wanted and deal with her as quickly as possible.

‘If you’ll follow me …?’

He turned and led the way through a flagstone-paved entrance hall, its arches and whitewashed walls decorated with remnants of long-ago disassembled suits of armour, then showed her into the yellow drawing room—the smallest and warmest reception room on the ground floor of the castle.

Gold-coloured damask covered the walls, fringed with heavy brocade tassels under the plaster coving at the top. There were antique tables covered in trinkets and family photographs, a grand piano, and a large squashy sofa in front of the vast marble fireplace. Off to one side of the hearth, in a high-backed leather armchair, reading his daily newspaper, was his grandfather. He looked so innocent. No one would guess he’d ignited a bit of a family row with this window obsession.

Marcus wasn’t exactly sure what the kerfuffle was about—something that had happened decades earlier, in a time when stiff-lipped silence had been the preferred solution to every problem—but his great-aunt Tabitha had warned him that Bertie was about to open a Pandora’s box of trouble, and nothing any of them learned about whatever the family had been keeping quiet for more than half a century would make anyone any happier.

Disruption was the last thing he needed—especially as he’d spent the last couple of years getting everything back on an even keel. Bertie might live at Hadsborough now, but in his younger years he’d all but abandoned his duty to explore the world.

Unfortunately he’d passed his laissez-faire attitude down to his only son, and before his death Marcus’s father had just seen the castle as somewhere impressive to bring his business friends for the odd weekend. He’d also failed to keep hold of three wives, and the resulting divorce settlements had crippled the family finances further. But that was just the tip of the iceberg where his father had been concerned. It had taken centuries to build this family’s reputation, and his father had managed to rip it to shreds within twelve months.

So Marcus had left the City and come to Hadsborough to be by his grieving grandfather’s side. It was his job to claw it all back now. The Huntington family legacy had been neglected for too many generations. Taken for granted. These things couldn’t just be left to run their own course; they needed to be managed. Guarded. Or there would be nothing left—not even a good name—to pass on to his children when they came along.

‘Grandfather?’

The old man looked up from his paper, the habitual twinkle in his eye. Marcus nodded towards their guest.

‘I found Miss McKinnon, here, wandering in the grounds. I believe you are expecting her?’

If his grandfather had heard the extra emphasis in his grandson’s words he gave no sign he’d registered it. He carefully folded his paper, placed it on the table next to him, rose unsteadily to his feet and offered his hand to the stranger in their drawing room.

‘Miss McKinnon,’ he said, smiling. ‘Delighted to meet you.’

The old charmer, Marcus thought.

Faith McKinnon smiled politely and shook his hand. ‘Hi,’ she said. If she was charmed she didn’t show it.

‘Thank you for coming at such short notice,’ his grandfather said as he lowered himself carefully back into his chair. ‘If you don’t mind me saying, you resemble your grandmother.’

The blank, businesslike expression on Faith McKinnon’s face was replaced with one of surprise. ‘Really? Th-thank you.’

Marcus frowned. She’d been telling the truth, then. Yet the reliable hairs at the back of his neck had informed him she’d been lying about something.

Why was she puzzled that someone had said she resembled a family member? He glanced at the portrait of the third Duke over the mantelpiece and raised his fingers absentmindedly to touch the bridge of his nose. There was no escaping that distinctive feature in the Huntington family line. They all had it. Genetics had branded them and marked them as individual connections in a long chain. And, as the only direct heir, Marcus was determined not to be the weak link that ended the line.

He turned to his grandfather. ‘Miss McKinnon tells me you knew her grandmother?’

Before his grandfather could answer their guest interrupted. ‘Call me Faith, please.’

Bertie nodded and smiled back at her. ‘Mary and I were sweethearts for a time when I was in America after the war,’ his grandfather said. ‘She was an exceptional woman.’

Marcus turned sharply to look at him. Sweethearts? He’d never heard this before—never heard mention of a romance before his grandmother. It made him realise just how silent his family stayed on certain matters, that maybe he didn’t know everything about his own history.

‘Please do sit down, Miss McK…Faith,’ his grandfather said.

She chose the edge of the sofa, her knees pressed together and her hands in her lap. Marcus would have been quite content to remain standing, but he felt as if he was towering above the other two, somehow excluded from what they were about to discuss, so he dropped into the armchair opposite his grandfather, crossing one long leg over the other. But he couldn’t get comfortable, as he would have done if it had just been him and his grandfather alone as usual.

‘So, Grandfather…what has all this got to do with the window?’

At the mention of the window Miss McKinnon’s eyes widened and she leaned forward. ‘Gram said you need help with it?’

Marcus kept on watching her. Her voice was low and calm, but behind her speech was something else. As if his words had lit a fire inside her. Interesting. Just exactly what was she hoping to gain from this situation? He wouldn’t have pegged her for a con artist or a gold-digger, but they came in all shapes and sizes. Stepmothers one and two had proved that admirably.

His grandfather nodded. ‘It’s in a chapel on the estate here. I wouldn’t have thought any more of it, except that a few months ago my father’s younger brother died, and his widow found some letters my father had written to him in his personal effects. She wondered if I’d like to see them.’

Marcus squinted slightly. Yes, that would make sense. Now he thought about it, he realised it had been around that time that Grandfather had started muttering to himself and begun hiding himself away in the library, poring over old papers.

Bertie stared into the crackling fire in the grate. ‘My father died when I was very young, you see, and she thought I might get more of a sense of who he was through them.’

Marcus resisted the urge to scowl. After his recent heart surgery, and with his soaring blood pressure, the doctors had said his grandfather needed rest and quiet. No stress. They had definitely not prescribed getting all stirred up about a family mystery—if indeed there was one. It would be best to leave it all alone, let time settle like silt over those memories until they were buried. There had been enough scandal in the present. They didn’t need extra dredged up from the past.

Pursuing this thing with the window was a bad idea on so many levels. That was why he intended to get the facts out of his grandfather quickly and show this Miss McKinnon the blasted window, if that was what she really wanted. Because the sooner she was off the estate and he could get things back to normal the better.

CHAPTER TWO