The Heiress Bride - Catherine Coulter [72]
“But she just told me how much she hated how everything was going to rot and how the crofters’ children were crying with hunger.”
“What wickedness! Our crofters’ children are never hungry! Och, if the laird had heard her say that, he’d have lost his wig right ’n tight!”
“How very odd. She’s trying to sow dissension. Now, why would she want to do that? Surely it couldn’t be just for my benefit.” And Sinjun wondered about the other things she’d said. Were they lies, too? Very probably.
“After her sister, Lady Judith, died some five years ago—that was his lordship’s mother—Miss MacGregor believed that the old laird would wed her, but he didn’t. I believe he bedded her, but it wasn’t marriage in the kirk he had in mind. Men, och! All alike they are, save for Mr. Seton, who has no interest at all in the desires of the flesh.”
“I’m very sorry, Mrs. Seton.”
“Aye, my lady, I am, too. In any case, Miss MacGregor was very angry, and as time passed she became more and more bitter. Petty, I guess ye’d say, with all of us. Ah, but she loved and pet Malcolm—the Kinross laird for such a short time, he was—and she treated him like a little prince. Malcolm even preferred her to his own mother, he did, because she spoiled him into rottenness and his mother swatted his hands but good when he was naughty. He’d run to Miss MacGregor and whine. Och, it wasn’t good for his character, needless to say. A wastrel he became, beggin’ yer pardon, my lady, but a wastrel he was, truly, just like his pa. Then he died all unexpected like, and Master Colin became the Kinross laird. We’ve yet to see what he will do. At least he isn’t a wastrel, and he’s fair. Perhaps there is more, but I don’t know of it. As to the state of the castle, why, gentlemen rarely notice the state of things, until the cobwebs fall into their soup an’ wind about their spoon. O’ course, my lady, Fiona didn’t care. When finally I did mention it to the new laird, he said we had no money for anything.”
“Well, now we have money, and we have the will to do something, and you and I will see to it. By the time his lordship returns, Vere Castle will look like it did in his mother’s time.”
“Och, ’tis a fine day indeed when his lordship found ye to buy him.”
“I would prefer that you said that a bit more diplomatically, Mrs. Seton.”
“Aye, my lady.”
Sinjun left the housekeeper’s room whistling, tickled with herself that she’d had the foresight to remove her still nearly two hundred pounds from Colin’s keeping. She wondered what he’d think when he missed the money.
Sinjun lay in the huge laird’s bed, aware that even though the sheets were clean and the covers well aired, there was still a clinging musty smell of a room left closed up too long.
Her first three days at Vere Castle had passed quickly. Goodness, there was so much to be done. Mrs. Seton had already hired a good dozen women and another six men to come and clean the castle. Sinjun herself planned to scour this room. If she’d waited as her husband had demanded, her list for him would have stretched to the North Sea. Naturally, she’d never had any intention of waiting. She had visited Colin’s room in the north tower and had been charmed and dismayed. The stairs reaching the room were dangerous, the wood rotted in many places. Treacherous. The room itself was moldy, and all his books were in danger of rotting if she didn’t act soon. She intended it to be in perfect condition before her husband ever again ventured up to his tower room.
Mrs. Seton; Murdock the Stunted, who came only to Sinjun’s armpit and was one of Colin’s most trusted servants, who did a bit of everything; and Mr. Seton the Kinross steward—the abstinent steward—all had accompanied her to Kinross the day before. Mrs. Seton, a fount of local knowledge, had been right: Kinross boasted both a seamstress and a man who worked with wood, and every sort of shop one could wish for.
Kinross-shire was a small, quite pretty country town, mainly a base for the fishermen for nearby Loch Leven. A narrow road clung