“Please. Wait here. I want to show ye something.”
He ran out of the room, shouting for Jannet. She was his and Maeve’s nanny before she became a lady’s maid. She would know where their toys were stored.
“Jannet!” he bellowed as he ran down the stairs.
“What are ye yelling aboot?” Jannet said from the door that led to the kitchen.
“I have to find a game, a game I had when I was a wee lad.”
“All yer childhood things are in the attic.” Jannet clasped his arm to stop him from leaving. Her eyes narrowed, and she tilted her head. “What are ye looking for?”
“A game Mark and Dianne gave me.”
“Och, Mark and Dianne. Come this way.” She turned and headed back down to the kitchen.
Iain followed. “But ye said they were in the attic.”
“Aye, yer Scottish childhood things, but not anything from Dianne and Mark. Yer father’s friends were very secretive, ye know.”
Iain thought that if they were from the future, they had every reason to be secretive.
Jannet rushed through the busy kitchen, into the pantry, and pushed aside a large set of shelves laden with bags and bottles with ease. A heavy wooden door filled with strips of metal and with a lock made from the same type of metal stood behind the shelves.
Iain felt along the shelving unit and down the metal sides of the structure with his hands but couldn’t find anything untoward, except that they were all joined together to make one piece by the strips of metal. “How?”
Jannet laughed. “Look down. See those indentations alongthe floor? Mark called them rails, and although we didn’t know what he was talking about, we could see the little wheels on the bottom of theunit. That’s what Dianne called the shelves.”
Iain bent down, and sure enough, there were six small wheels fastened to the underside of the shelves.
Opening the door, Jannet swept her hand before her, indicating Iain should enter first. Darkness engulfed him as he stepped over the threshold, and he blinked, trying to get his eyes used to the gloom, but then a soft warm light brightened the room somewhat.
Clothes hung from hangers on the back wall and shelves were filled with his family’s keepsakes, but Iain spotted the board game on an old wooden table in the center of the room.
The room brightened and he spun around. Jannet had set a sconce on fire on either side of the now-closed door. He eyed the metal-clasped door.
Jannet smiled. “When I closed the door, the unit glided back into place on the other side.”
“Why didn’t ye tell me aboot this place?”
“Yer father told me to only show ye the room and its contents if ye asked about Mark and Dianne. He believed until then, ye wouldna be ready for the truth.”
Walking slowly around the table as if he were stalking a deer, Iain scratched his chin. The truth of what? “That makes no sense.”
“Why did ye ask aboot the game, then? Why now? Is it because of the lass ye brought into the keep?”
Iain regarded Jannet with new eyes. She had been his and Maeve’s nanny, but she had also been his mother’s closest confidant, and after his mother had passed into the next life, she had been his father’s rock. She’d kept him going for the clan, for his children, for himself.
“Ye knew about them? Ye knew why they were different from us?”
“Aye, yer mother and father trusted me to keep their secret. Now tell me, why do ye want the game now, and where is the lass from?”
“I want to show it to her, to ask if she’s ever seen the likes of it before, and I don’t know where she is from, but she says she is leaving this night.”
Just saying the words brought a new ache to Iain’s chest.
“Does she have a white ornamental piece?”
“Aye.”
