“You must make haste,” MacKenzie said, and nodded at the copper basin in front of the hearth. Steam was swirling lazily into the cool air. “His lordship’s guest has arrived.”
“What—already?”
The clock next to the chamber door said it was not yet three in the afternoon.
MacKenzie pursed her lips. “He’s arrived early. Poor manners if I may say so—everyone’s in a tizzy. But the tub’s ready for you.”
“Good grief,” Catriona muttered. A sudden change in schedule made her feel queasy on the best of days. “Oooh,” she then said. “Oh no. Oh dear.”
She felt so weak, it was as though her heart had stopped.
“Dinna fash,” came MacKenzie’s voice from a distance. “The earl has just returned, he was at the Middletons’—they are separating, the Middletons, have you heard . . . but his lordship is back, and he’s entertaining the young gentleman until dinner. All’s well.”
All this was easy for MacKenzie to say, because she didn’t know about the stranger at the loch.
“He rolled his r’s,” she moaned.
“Huh?”
She buried her face in her hands. “This is bad.”
“If you bathe now, you should be ready soon enough,” MacKenzie said in the soothing tone she used on the unwell.
Catriona looked up at her, feeling dizzy. “Did our guest take a walk after his arrival?”
The math was damning: two strangers on the same day in remote Applecross was highly improbable. Had she not been so shocked, and so set on him arriving at seven, this would have occurred to her it was happening.
“I don’t know if the gentleman went for a walk,” said MacKenzie. She opened the top drawer of the dresser next to the fireplace to take out a stack of towels. “Once Mary told me he was here, I saw to the bath and laid out your clothes.”
While MacKenzie’s back was turned, Catriona rose, dropped the damp plaid, and climbed into the heat of the tub.
“What’s he like?” she forced herself to ask.
MacKenzie placed the towels on the footstool next to the tub and straightened with a soft grunt. “I haven’t seen him,” she said. “Mary said he’s brought a trunk full of wine and he carried it from the carriage all by himself.”
She should have asked questions about the man when the earl had announced a visitor, but, frustrated by the news, she hadn’t. She knew he was an expert on Phoenician high culture from the Levant, Mount Lebanon more precisely, with several terms at Cambridge among his credentials. He was one of the numerous international scholars interested in an exchange with Oxbridge academics, and, apparently, just the person Wester Ross needed to assist with cataloging some of the Eastern artifacts back at Oxford. Voilà. What if he had said wallah—Arabic—and not voilà—French—and in the heat of the moment, she had misunderstood? The penny would have dropped sooner. Wallah, you shall never see me again. Well. Well, they would see about that.
“What a day,” she said tonelessly.
“I’ll be back to help do up your hair in half an hour,” MacKenzie said. She walked to the door with a slight limp that had certainly not been there before.
Catriona contemplated this as MacKenzie’s steps faded away, momentarily distracted from her scandalous situation.
While her father diverted time and attention toward hosting academic guests, the castle was crumbling around them, weeds conquered the grounds, and the people in charge of maintaining it all were increasingly plagued by their own ailments. An attempt at a land sale with neighboring Baron Middleton, which could have eased the strain on the Campbell purse, had fallen through in the spring. No wonder her thumbnails were bitten to the quick. In the end, it was the earl’s and her responsibility to run Applecross, but they were as bad as each other when it came to managing the stewards and accountants. Usually they justified their neglect with their cerebral brilliance—who had time to look after ledgers if one could add to the production of knowledge or advance women’s rights instead? However, lately, she was failing at it, the brilliance. On her desk below the window loomed a stack of books. She had already scoured it top to bottom for inspiration. After co-authoring countless papers with Wester Ross, she had been keen to finally write a book in her own name, on a topic of her choosing, but a curious blank yawned where passion should have been. Writing without that passion was like squeezing water from a stone; weeks had passed and her well was still running dry. She had no noble excuse left for letting Applecross fall into ruin.