Return to Love by Vivian Stuart

Author:Vivian Stuart
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Jentas Ehf
Published: 2022-10-25T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TEN

THERE WAS a curious faded grandeur about Castle Guise, Jill thought, as she stood in the huge, flagstone hall and watched Ninian carry his brother’s wife across it. He called to her apologetically over his shoulder, “Do you mind waiting, Jill? I’ll be with you in a moment,” before vanishing with his burden behind a green baize door.

Left alone, Jill waited, looking about her with interest.

The walls, like the floor and the high, vaulted ceiling, were of stone and immensely thick. Pierced in places by narrow, arrow-slit windows, the one nearest her was adorned with trophies of the chase—stag’s heads and the stuffed masks of foxes, the head of a magnificent tiger— and a collection of spears and old sporting rifles. Half a dozen of Ninian’s ancestors, immortalized in oils, gazed down at her mournfully from the farthest wall and from the paneled staircase. They were grim, unsmiling gentlemen, some better painted than others but all, without exception, wearing a kilt and looking as if the tedium of sitting for an artist had taxed their patience to its limit.

Jill thought them depressing and she looked away hastily, only to find her gaze riveted on a vast stuffed brown bear that held a gong suspended by a knotted red cord from its snarly, toothy jaws. The padded stick, used presumably to beat on this, rested ludicrously across the great beast’s forelegs, giving it a strange air of resentful domesticity.

She was examining it when Ninian rejoined her.

“I’m sorry,” he said, putting an arm lightly about her shoulders, “because I know you’ll want to wash before we go into lunch. But poor Cathie does seem to have hurt herself more than she’ll admit, so I had to hand her over to Elspeth for the appropriate treatment. Well—” he grinned at her “—I see you’re admiring our gong. He’s been here since the year one. It’s one of my grandfather’s contributions to the interior decoration. Andrew and I call him Alfred.”

“He’s a bit startling,” Jill averred. “Did your grandfather shoot the tiger as well? ’ ’

“George?” Ninian’s grin spread. “Yes, indeed. Grandfather was a famous shot in his day, I believe. Or so gran maintains, anyway—she won’t have any of his trophies moved, though Cathie thinks they’re hideous. I don’t know, I suppose one gets used to them and they fit in with the s’cheme of things, don’t they? I confess I should miss both Alfred and George if they weren’t in their accustomed places. Now then, about that wash. Could you manage in the downstairs cloakroom, do you think? I was going to take you to Cathie’s room, but I’m not well up on the geography of the place these days, so I’m not sure where it is.”

“I don’t mind,” Jill assured him, “so long as I can get the smell of salmon off my hands and tidy my hair a bit. I don’t want to give your grandmother the wrong impression.”

“Don’t worry,” Ninian agreed, “you won’t. She’ll be delighted to know that we’re going to have another fisherman in the family.

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