The Forbidden Promise. Lorna Cook

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      They stood and looked at each other. He was obviously a man who had to have the last word and Kate wasn’t in the mood for a fight.

      ‘What’s your dog’s name?’ She changed the subject.

      James smiled. ‘Whisky. I didn’t name him. He was my dad’s dog. He’s just sort of become mine since Dad died.’

      ‘Good name,’ Kate said. ‘Appropriate, given we’re probably surrounded by distilleries.’

      ‘True. Although depending on the mood he was in, it was often difficult to tell if Dad was yelling for someone to bring him a stiff drink or if he was summoning the dog for a walk.’ James looked wistful and as he smiled there was a hint of mellowness in his eyes. He was almost pleasant when he let his defensive barriers down.

      ‘Shall we look at the cottage then?’ Kate suggested.

      ‘Don’t get your hopes up,’ James replied as he turned. She followed him. ‘It’s not been lived in since before the war. The house hasn’t had a ghillie since then, so it’s fallen into disrepair. I’m in the process of doing it up. I want to get it ready to let, then that’s one thing ticked off the never-ending list of jobs. We’ll get some incoming cash and it can help fund us while we sort the main house and whatever else we intend to do.’

      Kate nodded. ‘That actually sounds like a good idea,’ she confessed.

      ‘Actually?’ James queried. ‘You weren’t expecting me to have come up with a decent plan myself?’

      She sighed. It was disappointing how quickly he reverted back to defensive. ‘Sorry. I didn’t mean it like that.’

      ‘Anyway,’ he continued as they trampled through the thick undergrowth, snapping twigs and dodging nettles as they trod. ‘As the main house started to fall away, so did the ghillie’s cottage. After the war, there weren’t as many staff, no ghillie, no real estate management – either land or financial from what I could gather. It was a case of trying to eke the coffers out as far as they’d stretch.

      ‘Even my father, when he arrived some years later, with all good intentions, didn’t have it in him to cast his eyes further than Invermoray House itself.’

      ‘When he arrived?’ Kate questioned. ‘What do you mean?’

      James looked at Kate as they walked. He was quite tall and she could feel herself almost jogging to keep up with his long strides.

      ‘Has Mum not explained the family history to you?’

      ‘No.’

      He exhaled. ‘God, where do I start?’

      ‘At the beginning?’ She smiled.

      James raised an eyebrow and half-smiled in return as he launched into the story.

      ‘The estate never used to be Dad’s. He lived and grew up in a house in London,’ James said. ‘Dad was an artist …’ This explained the modern artwork around the sitting room, Kate thought. ‘Not the tortured kind, more the jovial kind,’ he continued. ‘But certainly the kind that never made any money. He and Mum lived happily in London with holes in the ceiling and the boiler forever going wrong. It’s why Invermoray’s fared the same in terms of maintenance. I think it’s an attitude thing. Anyway, he inherited Invermoray in the 1980s, when relations of his passed away. Very distant relations from what I could work out. Either way, it was his. Dad quite fancied playing lord of the manor and so we sold the London house and decamped completely up here when I was a kid. In truth, I’ve never quite forgiven them.’

      They stopped as they reached a clearing. ‘I just assumed it had been in your family for generations,’ Kate said.

      ‘It has been, since it was built in the early Victorian era. But for the other branch of the family, the McLays. Our last name was … is … Langley but the will asked for the McLay family name to be carried on, bolted on to ours. You can’t dictate that kind of thing from beyond the grave, the solicitor said, but Dad did it regardless; felt he owed it to them. So we became Langley-McLay, officially. Dad used it. Mum still does. But I don’t.’

      ‘Why not?’ Kate asked.

      ‘I suppose I felt like an idiot, changing my name, and a bit resentful at having moved up here. Invermoray never really felt like home. Never really felt like me.’

      ‘So who were the McLays then?’ Kate was curious now. ‘Who asked you to adopt their name in exchange for the house, which by the way sounds like a really fair trade?’

      ‘Fair trade? It’s the worst kind of trade. This house is a bloody drain on us. Always has been.’ James screwed up his face as he thought. ‘It’s some boring connection,’ he told her. ‘One of Dad’s cousins or something like that. He and his wife were elderly. I think he died in the early Eighties and then she followed not long after. It’s all a bit odd really if you think about it. They had two grown-up children, I believe. There’s portraits of them in the house. Mum found the pictures buried in the attic a while back.’

      Kate remembered the portraits on the stairs, the young man in RAF uniform, the girl in the silver-grey dress. She wondered if they were who James meant.

      ‘They should have inherited, one or the other of them, according to Mum,’ James continued. ‘But for one reason or another they’d lost touch with their parents, or maybe died. I’m not sure. There was a family rumour they had been disinherited years and years earlier but Dad and his parents didn’t take it seriously. So it was a complete shock when the line of inheritance missed out the McLays’ direct descendants for whatever reason, skipped sideways and landed on us Langleys.’

      Kate hadn’t been paying too much attention to her surroundings. Instead she’d been entranced by James’s strange tale. It was with some surprise that she found they had reached the cottage. James had been right. From the direction of the loch, the hedges had tangled into thicket and had built up to a high level, camouflaging it from view. It was unlikely she would have seen it had she been alone. Instead they had doubled round and approached the cottage from the direction of the road that ran to the front of the estate. James’s battered Land Rover was parked some distance away on the track. It was a marvel he’d managed to locate her really.

      ‘Thank you,’ Kate said.

      He frowned. ‘What for?’

      ‘Making the effort to find me, out there.’ She gestured to what she had now decided was The Wilderness.

      He shrugged. ‘Don’t worry about it. You might have found it eventually.’ He raised his eyebrows theatrically. ‘Then again … you might not.’

      She couldn’t help but laugh.

      James bent down and pulled the brass key out from underneath the mat.

      ‘That’s a really brave place to keep it,’ Kate said. ‘Anyone could find it.’

      ‘Out here?’ He rolled his eyes as he unlocked the thick wooden door. ‘You couldn’t.’ He looked pleased with his own joke. ‘Besides, it’s not here permanently. I left it there so the roofer could finish and pick up his tools. At least it’s watertight now. As I said—’ he indicated the cottage ‘—it’s СКАЧАТЬ