OLD LODGE, THE HIGHLANDS
In that way that the forests that surrounded the highlands were timeless, it seemed that we had been there only a few days instead of the past few weeks after leaving Edinburgh.
It was done. My friend’s murder, and that of old Meggy Adams, had been solved. The man who had murdered them was himself now dead.
Yet there had been those final moments, when I looked down at Mr. Elias on the sidewalk after his fall from the roof, broken and dying, and it was impossible to feel any remorse.
He stared up at me with a strange expression, something very near fear from a man who seemed to fear nothing. In his fine clothes with those blue feathers, his arrogance, and the coldness that had taken two lives, and very nearly three.
Then he was gone, his spirit appearing to simply vanish, as if he had never really been there, except for the disgusting shell of the charred body that remained.
All I knew in that moment was that he was gone and would never harm anyone again. I was grateful for that. And if one believed that a spirit could rest in peace, then I hoped it was true for Dory.
She had been a true friend to me a long time ago when I had none. In many ways, I suppose it could be said that she had saved my life. I would always be grateful for that, would always miss her, and would always regret that I had not done the same for her.
As for Mr. Elias? Let the devil have him!
Munro said afterward that a man like Elias was merely a man sent by another to do his work. The man who had paid for him to kill Dory and Meggy Adams, and it appeared to kill me as well, was still out there.
“Why?” I asked myself that question a dozen times since. There was no answer.
Munro brought me to Old Lodge, a place with forests that surrounded the rambling hunting lodge that was now a distillery of very fine whisky, a place we had both been to before.
There was no argument as in the past. He simply accepted that I needed to come here, that I had made my own decision, and I would not go back to London. At least not for now.
I took long walks while he worked with Mr. Hutton, who was manager of Old Lodge. In the long barns where the whisky fermented and shipments of cases of the whisky were sent off in wagons. The last for the year that would be shipped before winter made it impossible for the wagons to get out. Or in the office he occupied where he went over the billings for those shipments, with invoices to be sent on his next trip into the nearby village.
I was still trying to understand the ‘gift’ that Elizabeth Cheney had first recognized. She had called it both a curse and a blessing in the days after that encounter on the roof at Albany Street.
What was it? Where did it come from? Was it something I was born with, this strange ability that seemed to grow with each passing day? Did my mother possess this ability?
Munro had spoken of it, in a moment of anger.
‘What are ye, then? A witch?’
Women had been persecuted for witchcraft for centuries.
“That doesna mean it isn’t real, dear. Only ye can decide what ye will do with the gift ye have,”Elizabeth had told me before leaving Edinburgh.
“Ye have a good heart. Otherwise, Kip and myself might be dead as well. You are the only one who can decide if ye will accept your gift or not, and how ye will use it.”
Perhaps that was the reason Munro had remained distant, leaving each morning with Mr. Hutton, the manager at Old Lodge, to inspect the distillery or go over the records, or some other task that pulled him away.
There were times when I looked up to find him watching me with a frown, as if he expected me to change into some creature. And then he would be gone again, closed off in the room he usually occupied when he visited Old Lodge on business for Lady Antonia.
I had sent letters to both Lady Antonia and Mikaela and explained things that I had not previously. I informed them both about Dory’s death, that it had been resolved, without the details of how it all finally ended.
In those letters I had also explained that I intended to remain in Edinburgh. As they both were aware, there was still the reason I had come there in the first place—to find my real family. I had simply closed each letter by saying that I felt the need to go to Old Lodge, and Munro had agreed to travel there with me.
It felt like coming home, in a strange way. It was something that was difficult to explain, and so I had simply left it that I wanted to see Old Lodge again, even as winter set in. And it was here that I experienced things even stronger than I had in Edinburgh.
There were places that were familiar in Edinburgh, but I was certain I had never been before, that ‘knowing’ of something before it happened, images that appeared then disappeared, and that strange energy that began in my hands as it had when I first encountered Mr. Elias. And then that last night on the roof of the tenement at Albany Street.
I didn’t know how to explain it, and so I hadn’t spoken of it.
Munro was there now, very close, a presence felt rather than heard as he approached through the new-fallen snow that had covered Old Lodge and the surrounding forest.
In a way, we were both castoffs, I thought. One who chose not to look back, and myself, who wanted very much to know where I had come from. It was an answer that was not there yet.
