“I just wish I could see Mary and Lily,” she blurted out, before she could stop herself. Effie paused for a moment in brushing her hair, but then started once more.
“Yer sisters, are they not?”
Amelia nodded. It still stung to so much as think of them, but she knew she would be better off talking about them than trying to contain all the memories of them.
“Aye, I cannae imagine how it’s been for you, being apart from them,” Effie murmured. “I dinnae have sisters, but my cousins are like my wee sisters, and I wouldn’t cope with being away from them for so long.”
Amelia nodded. It had only been a matter of weeks, really, since she had last seen her little sisters, but it felt like they had been apart for a lifetime, perhaps due to how much she had changed in that time, or perhaps because of how much fear she held that something terrible might have been happening to them in her absence.
“Do you know much about Arran—I mean, the Laird’s family?” Amelia asked. When they had been out at the pond together, she had noticed the abruptness with which he had steered the conversation away from his mother when she had come up. She couldn’t help but wonder if there was more to that story than just the grief of having lost her, or perhaps not having known her at all.
Effie fell silent for a moment, and, at first, Amelia wondered if she hadn’t heard her at all. But then, with a furtive glance around, she lowered her voice and leaned a little closer.
“Aye, I’ve heard some… stories,” she admitted at last. Her tone was careful, as though she half-expected someone to swoop in and silence her before she could continue.
“Stories?” Amelia prompted her nervously. “Stories like what?”
“About his mother,” she replied, as Amelia turned to face her. Effie’s hands dropped into her lap, and she twisted her fingers into knots around each other.
“What about her?”
Amelia got the feeling she was going to have to guide Effie every step of the way. Whatever she had heard, it clearly spooked her. In the short time she had known the other woman, Amelia had never seen Effie so nervous or doubtful. She’d have been lying if she said it didn’t worry her. Perhaps this was where the stories about his brutish nature had come from.
“That she was a foreigner, too,” she replied. “An Sassenach, an outlander, like you. That part, it seems everyone can agree on, but what happened to her…”
She hesitated a moment before she continued.
“I’ve heard some people say that she died within these very walls,” she remarked, gesturing around her. Amelia’s stomach dropped, the color of the walls that contained them suddenly more macabre than before.
“So, did she? What happened?”
“I wasnae here when she was,” Effie admitted. “I can only tell ye what I’ve heard, and it’s… A lot of it contradicts itself.”
“Why? How?”
“There are some people who think that she took off into the night,” she explained. “Fled from here for some reason or another, though naebody can say what that might be. And that, as a result…”
Her eyes darted this way and that. Amelia’s heart twisted in her chest. She was sure that, whatever came out of Effie’s mouth next, she wasn’t going to like it.
“He had all the foreigners in the land killed.”
Those words just hung there, and Amelia did all she could to make sense of them. She could still recall the fear with which her father’s advisor had spoken about Arran. Was this why? Could it have been because he had killed off all the foreigners in the land, due to his mother’s abandonment? It was hard to believe that the man who had cradled her so tenderly the night before could have been capable of such brutality, but there were depths to him she knew she had yet to discover.
“If ye talk to some of the older maids here, they’ll tell ye that her ghost still roams the corridors,” she remarked, shooting a look towards the door as though the spirit might have been wafting there in that very moment. “I’ve never come across her myself, but this place does have an eeriness to it, on some nights…”
Amelia’s skin prickled with a sudden coldness. Effie was right. There was something to this place, though she had always put it down to the circumstances she herself had been brought here under. But maybe something more sinister lurked beneath the surface, something she might not have been able to put into the words. A troubled memory, a spirit tormented by the history of everything she had gone through.
“But ye ken how they can be,” Effie added quickly, as though sensing her lady’s discomfort. “Old wives’ tales. Meant to send a shiver up yer spine and little more. There! Yer hair is done.”
She rose to her feet.
“I should be going.”
With that, she scurried to the door, like she doubted her ability not to say too much. Amelia watched as she went, and, when the door fell shut behind her, she suddenly felt more alone than she had in a long time.
Was what she was saying true? Could it be? She supposed there was only one way for her to find out. She would need to speak to the Laird herself. She was not sure if he would be willingto expand on anything she had heard from Effie, but, as his wife, didn’t she deserve to know if there were dark secrets hiding beneath the veil of this place?
Amelia rose from her chair and strode to the door, mustering as much confidence as she could as she went to find her husband.
