A Christmas Letter: Snowbound in the Earl's Castle

If his grandfather had heard the extra emphasis in his grandson’s words he gave no sign he’d registered it. He carefully folded his paper, placed it on the table next to him, rose unsteadily to his feet and offered his hand to the stranger in their drawing room.

‘Miss McKinnon,’ he said, smiling. ‘Delighted to meet you.’

The old charmer, Marcus thought.

Faith McKinnon smiled politely and shook his hand. ‘Hi,’ she said. If she was charmed she didn’t show it.

‘Thank you for coming at such short notice,’ his grandfather said as he lowered himself carefully back into his chair. ‘If you don’t mind me saying, you resemble your grandmother.’

The blank, businesslike expression on Faith McKinnon’s face was replaced with one of surprise. ‘Really? Th-thank you.’

Marcus frowned. She’d been telling the truth, then. Yet the reliable hairs at the back of his neck had informed him she’d been lying about something.

Why was she puzzled that someone had said she resembled a family member? He glanced at the portrait of the third Duke over the mantelpiece and raised his fingers absentmindedly to touch the bridge of his nose. There was no escaping that distinctive feature in the Huntington family line. They all had it. Genetics had branded them and marked them as individual connections in a long chain. And, as the only direct heir, Marcus was determined not to be the weak link that ended the line.

He turned to his grandfather. ‘Miss McKinnon tells me you knew her grandmother?’

Before his grandfather could answer their guest interrupted. ‘Call me Faith, please.’

Bertie nodded and smiled back at her. ‘Mary and I were sweethearts for a time when I was in America after the war,’ his grandfather said. ‘She was an exceptional woman.’

Marcus turned sharply to look at him. Sweethearts? He’d never heard this before—never heard mention of a romance before his grandmother. It made him realise just how silent his family stayed on certain matters, that maybe he didn’t know everything about his own history.

‘Please do sit down, Miss McK…Faith,’ his grandfather said.

She chose the edge of the sofa, her knees pressed together and her hands in her lap. Marcus would have been quite content to remain standing, but he felt as if he was towering above the other two, somehow excluded from what they were about to discuss, so he dropped into the armchair opposite his grandfather, crossing one long leg over the other. But he couldn’t get comfortable, as he would have done if it had just been him and his grandfather alone as usual.

‘So, Grandfather…what has all this got to do with the window?’

At the mention of the window Miss McKinnon’s eyes widened and she leaned forward. ‘Gram said you need help with it?’

Marcus kept on watching her. Her voice was low and calm, but behind her speech was something else. As if his words had lit a fire inside her. Interesting. Just exactly what was she hoping to gain from this situation? He wouldn’t have pegged her for a con artist or a gold-digger, but they came in all shapes and sizes. Stepmothers one and two had proved that admirably.

His grandfather nodded. ‘It’s in a chapel on the estate here. I wouldn’t have thought any more of it, except that a few months ago my father’s younger brother died, and his widow found some letters my father had written to him in his personal effects. She wondered if I’d like to see them.’

Marcus squinted slightly. Yes, that would make sense. Now he thought about it, he realised it had been around that time that Grandfather had started muttering to himself and begun hiding himself away in the library, poring over old papers.

Bertie stared into the crackling fire in the grate. ‘My father died when I was very young, you see, and she thought I might get more of a sense of who he was through them.’

Marcus resisted the urge to scowl. After his recent heart surgery, and with his soaring blood pressure, the doctors had said his grandfather needed rest and quiet. No stress. They had definitely not prescribed getting all stirred up about a family mystery—if indeed there was one. It would be best to leave it all alone, let time settle like silt over those memories until they were buried. There had been enough scandal in the present. They didn’t need extra dredged up from the past.

Pursuing this thing with the window was a bad idea on so many levels. That was why he intended to get the facts out of his grandfather quickly and show this Miss McKinnon the blasted window, if that was what she really wanted. Because the sooner she was off the estate and he could get things back to normal the better.

CHAPTER TWO

FAITH frowned. While Bertie—she couldn’t quite get used to thinking of this gentle old man as a duke—was charming, she didn’t see what his family history had to do with anything.

‘I’m sorry…but how does this connect to the window in the chapel?’

At least she knew that much now. A church window. Next task was to gauge how old it was.

Bertie was staring into the fire again. She had the feeling he’d wandered off into his own memories. Perhaps that was nice, if you had a solid and well-adjusted family as he had, but in Faith’s view the less time she spent thinking about her family the better. They certainly didn’t make her feel all warm and fuzzy and wistful.

When all three McKinnon sisters got together none of them behaved like the mature women they were; they regressed to childhood, resurrecting deeply embedded hurts and resentments, filtering every word through their past history. It was always the same, no matter how hard Gram pleaded, or how hard they tried to make it different each time. And when they added their flaky mother into the mix—well …

Bertie seemed to shake himself out of his reverie. ‘The original window was damaged during a storm almost a hundred years ago, and my father commissioned a new one to be made.’

‘And it needs restoration?’

The old man shrugged. ‘There does seem to be a little irregularity down at the bottom.’

So maybe it was all about establishing the history of the window—just what she was interested in herself. ‘My grandmother says you know who did the design?’

Another shrug. ‘Samuel Someone-or-other. I forget the last name.’ He stopped looking at her and his gaze wandered back to the fire.

‘Crowbridge,’ she said. ‘Samuel Crowbridge.’

And if Gram was right—if Crowbridge really had designed Bertie’s window—it would be the stained glass version of finding King Tut’s tomb. He’d only ventured into making windows late in his life, and none of the few examples remained. At least that was what everybody had thought …

She caught Marcus’s eye. His expression was unreadable, but he seemed to be watching her very carefully, as if he was expecting her to make a sudden move. Unfortunately, as well as the spike of irritation that shot through her at his superior, entitled study of her, there was a fizz of something much more pleasurable in her veins. She looked away.

She turned her attention back to his grandfather. ‘Mr…I mean, Your—’ She stopped, embarrassed at her lack of knowledge about what to call her host. Your Dukeness just didn’t sound right in her head.

‘Bertie is fine,’ the older man said. ‘I never did like all that nonsense.’

Marcus shook his head slightly at his grandfather’s response. Faith knew what she wanted to call him, whether he had a proper title or not. She sat up straighter. The grandson might have the looks—and some weird déjà vu thing going on—but she’d prefer Bertie’s company any day. She could totally understand why Gram had been so taken with him once.

‘Well, Bertie—’ she shot a look at his grandson ‘—if you don’t want the window repaired or evaluated, I’m not sure why I’m here.’ She hoped desperately he’d let her see it anyway—if only for a few moments.

Bertie’s eyes began to shine and he leaned forward. ‘You, my dear, are going to help me unravel a mystery.’

‘A mystery?’ she repeated slowly. She tried to sound neutral, but it came out sounding suspicious and cynical.

He nodded. ‘My mother left Hadsborough three years after my father died. I was always told that he’d married beneath himself, in both station and character, and that she hadn’t wanted to be stuck out in the countryside in a draughty heap of stones with a screaming child.’

Faith felt a familiar tug of sympathy inside her ribcage, but she ignored it, sat up straighter and blinked. She wasn’t going to get sucked in. She wasn’t going to get involved. She was here for the window and that was all.

‘I’m sure you were a cute baby,’ was all she said.

Bertie chuckled. ‘By all accounts I was a terror. Anyway, I was also told my father realised his mistake soon after the wedding. But people didn’t get divorced in those days, you see …’

Faith nodded—even though she didn’t really see. Her own mother had never felt tied by any strings of convention. If it had felt good she’d done it—and it had ripped her family apart. Maybe there was something to be said for doing your duty, sitting back and putting up with stuff, just so everyone else didn’t have to ride the tidal wave of consequences with you.

‘I have a feeling my uncle Reginald didn’t approve of my father’s choice of bride, so my father doesn’t mention her much in these letters, but I get the impression my parents were happy together.’

Faith could feel her curiosity rising. Don’t bite the bait, she told herself. Family squabbles are trouble. Best avoided. Best run away from.

‘And does he mention the window in the letters?’

Bertie grinned. ‘Oh, yes.’ He pulled some yellowing sheets of paper from a leather folder that he’d tucked down the side of his chair and leafed through them. ‘He wrote of his plans to rebuild the window to his brother. He seemed very excited about it.’ The smile disappeared from his face as he stopped and stared at one short letter. ‘He even mentioned it in his final letter.’ He looked up. ‘He survived the Great War, but died of flu the following year. This letter is the last one he wrote from hospital.’

He reached forward and offered the letter to Faith. Knowing it would probably pain him to get up, she rose and took it from him. She walked towards the fire and tried to make sense of the untidy scrawl. This was obviously the last communication of a man gripped by fever. The content was mostly family-related, which Faith skipped through. It wasn’t her business, even if she was starting to feel a certain sympathy for Bertie and his tragic father. She knew all about tragic fathers, be they dead or merely missing from one’s life.

‘Read the last paragraph,’ Bertie prompted.

Faith turned the page over and found it.

It was supposed to be a grand surprise, Reggie, but I don’t suppose I’ll get the chance to do it properly now. Tell Evie there’s a message for her. Tell her to look in the window.

Marcus stood up and strode across to where Faith was standing. He held out a hand, almost demanding the letter. She raised an eyebrow and made a point of reading it through one more time before handing it over.

He shook his head as he read. ‘Grandfather, you can’t put any stock in this. These are clearly the wanderings of a delirious mind.’

Bertie shook his head. ‘It’s all starting to come together…bits and pieces of conversations I’ve heard over the years…strange comments the servants made…I think my father loved my mother a lot more than I’ve been led to believe, and I want to know why she left—why the family would never talk about her.’

Faith withdrew from the warmth of the fire and sat back down on the edge of the sofa. She was more confused than ever. ‘I can understand that, Bertie …’

If anyone could understand it would be her—to have the security of knowing one parent hadn’t deserted you and the other hadn’t deceived you—she would have given anything to return to that wonderful state of bliss before she’d uncovered her own family’s secret.

‘But what does it have to do with me?’

He looked at her intently, his face serious. ‘You know about stained glass, about its traditions and imagery. I’ve stared at that damn window for hours in the last couple of weeks and I’ll be blasted if I can see anything there.’

He leaned forward and lowered his voice, and Faith couldn’t help tilting forward to mirror him.

‘I want you to find the clue my father left for my mother, Faith. I want you to find the message in the window.’

Her heart was hammering. She told herself it was from keeping up with Marcus Huntington’s blistering pace as he escorted her to the chapel. An outsider like her couldn’t be trusted to look at it on her own, of course.

She glanced at the sky above and realised she recognised that particular shade of grey. Snow was on its way. But a bit of snow didn’t worry her. Or even a whole bunch of it. Beckett’s Run had plenty every year. But Beckett’s Run knew how to deal with it. A few flakes and this country ground to a halt. So she wanted to be tucked up in her little holiday cottage with a stiff salty breeze blowing off the North Sea if it really decided to come down. Which meant she needed to get to work fast—something the man striding ahead of her would no doubt appreciate.

The path they’d been following led them through some trees and into a pretty hollow with a clearing. In the centre was a smaller version of a traditional English stone church. The grass under their feet must once have been a lawn, but it now rose knee-high, and the ground was lumpy with thick clumps of rye grass. Shrubs grew wild, bowed down with the weight of their unpruned branches. Some clung to the walls of the chapel to support themselves. Compared to the rest of the estate, this little corner appeared unkempt and uncared for.

Faith wasn’t one for believing in fairy stories. Not any more. And she had the feeling that Bertie, lovely as he was, had the capacity to spin a tall tale or two, but there was something about this little hidden part of the estate that made her wonder if the Huntingtons had deliberately neglected it.

She watched Marcus stride up to the heavy oak door ahead of her and shivered. Twenty-eight years old, and she’d never had a reaction to a man like this before. It was downright freaky.

Pure attraction she could have handled, but this was different. There was more to it. Extra layers below the fizzle of awareness. Pity she was too much of a coward to peel back the top layer and see what lay underneath.

Marcus slid a key into the black iron lock and turned it. He pushed the door open and motioned for her to go inside, stepping back out of the way so there was no danger of them passing within even three feet of each other.

It wouldn’t do her much good to peel back that layer, anyway. He didn’t want her here. The vibe emanated from him in waves, like a silent broadcast,

She turned back to watch him as he pulled the door closed and followed her inside. He caught her eye and immediately looked away.

She wasn’t the only coward.

He felt it, too. She knew he did. But he wanted it even less than her physical presence on his territory, and Faith wasn’t going to push it. No point trying to wriggle yourself into somewhere you didn’t belong.

She followed him inside, blinking a few times to adjust her eyes to the relative gloom. As always when she entered a church her eyes were drawn immediately to the windows at either end. Hardly able to help it, she ignored where her host was trying to lead her and veered off to stare at the multi-paned window at the back of the church near the door.

Soft light filtered through the glass, filling the dusty interior with colour. She held her breath. Both the glass picture high on the wall and the afternoon sun were beautiful in their own right, but when they met…it was magic.

Their entrance had disturbed a hundred million dust motes, and now the specks danced in the light, as if an unseen artist had painstakingly coloured each one a different shade. And not only did the shapes and pictures in the window sing, but some of that colour—that life—pierced the darkness of the sanctuary on beams of light, leaving kaleidoscope shadows where it fell.

She sighed, even though she could tell at a glance that this was not the window Bertie had been talking about. Too old. A nineteenth-century creation featuring Bible characters dressed in medieval garb. Didn’t matter. She was still captivated. These grand scenes always reminded her of the coloured plates from her favourite storybook as a child—noble men and beautiful ladies in flowing, heavy robes, bright lush pastures and an achingly blue heaven above.

‘It’s over here,’ a voice said from somewhere close to the altar.

Faith took one last look at the window and turned, screwing her ‘don’t care’ face back in place as she did so, and walked towards where Marcus Huntington was standing, hands in his pockets.

As she walked down the aisle she looked around. It was obvious someone had been trying to tidy the place up, but there was still a long way to go. Nothing a mop and a bucket and some elbow grease wouldn’t sort out, though.

‘We plan to reopen the chapel this year and have a Carol Service here,’ he explained, then stooped into a smaller niche in a side wall, revealing a much smaller stained glass window. He stepped back to give her access, but turned his intense stare her direction. ‘So…what do you think?’

Faith took a few paces towards the narrow window. It was maybe a foot wide and six feet high, with typical Gothic revival tracery at the top. Her heart began to pump. Could this really be it?

The glass was all rich colours and delicate paintwork: a fair-haired woman knelt praying at the bottom of the picture, her palms pressed together, face upturned, eyes fixed on the blaze of celestial glory at the top of the window. She was surrounded by flowers and shrubs, and a small dog sat at her feet, gazing at her in much the same way she was gazing at the heavens. It was stunning. And unusual. More like a painting in its composition than a church window.

There was something in the woman’s face…Something about her expression of pure joy that made Faith want to lean in and touch her—see if she could absorb some of that emotion by pure osmosis. Truly, the window was enchanting.

She turned round to see what her reluctant host could tell her about it and bumped into something warm and solid. She’d been aware that he’d been standing behind her, but not that he’d stepped in closer.

‘S-sorry!’ she stuttered, finding herself staring into his chest.

‘Well?’ he asked, a hint of impatience in his tone.

She knew she really ought to step back, move away, but her gaze had snagged on a feathery piece of cobweb that was stuck in his hair just above his right temple. For some reason she was suddenly much more interested in reaching up and gently brushing it away than turning round and looking at the coloured glass and lead she’d been so desperate to set eyes on.

What was even more worrying was the fact that she’d almost done it anyway—as if she’d known him long enough to share that easy kind of intimacy. It seemed unnatural not to.

Breathe, Faith. Turn around. Just because he looks like a modern-day Prince Charming it doesn’t mean you should audition for the role of Cinderella. That would be a really dumb idea.

He frowned, followed her gaze, and discovered the cobweb on his own. He brushed it away with long fingers and then did the oddest thing: he chuckled softly. To himself, though. None of the humour was to be shared with her. But it changed his face completely, softening the angular planes, and made him seem younger, less stand-offish. Faith discovered she’d stopped breathing.

No. Don’t you do it, Faith McKinnon. Don’t you believe where there’s no hope. You learned those lessons young. You’re not that soft-hearted girl any more, remember?

She didn’t smile back at him, but turned abruptly and stared at the window again. He moved away, thank goodness, walked closer to the window to inspect it for himself. They remained silent for a few minutes, both focused intently on the gently lit glass picture in front of them.

Marcus came and stood beside her. ‘For a long time all the windows here were boarded up. I don’t think I’ve ever taken a really good look at this before. It’s actually quite beautiful.’

Faith nodded, still staring at the golden-haired woman. ‘If I lived here I’d come to see it every day.’

He folded his arms and looked around. ‘This chapel hasn’t been used by the family for decades. No one has been here much since—’ He stopped short, as if a jagged thunderbolt of a thought had just hit him, and then turned to look at her. ‘Since my grandfather was a small boy.’

She met his gaze. ‘You think there’s a link? Something to do with what your grandfather said earlier?’

He pressed his lips together. ‘There could be any one of a dozen reasons why the family has left this place alone. For a start, I don’t think any of my immediate ancestors were very religious.’

He wasn’t going to budge an inch, was he? On anything. He was right and everyone else was wrong. That chapped her hide. He reminded her so much of her older sister, always issuing orders as if they were divine decrees.

She folded her arms across her chest. ‘You don’t believe him, do you?’

He was silent for a few seconds, and then turned his attention back to the stained glass window. ‘I believe there was some big family ruckus—probably a storm in a teacup—but as for there being a secret message in the window…It seems a little far-fetched.’ He sighed. ‘I think it’s what my grandfather wants to believe.’

Faith chewed the side of her lip. No pressure, then. It was just up to her to confirm or crush an old man’s dreams. She stepped forward again and focused once more on the subject of all the controversy.

‘See anything out of the ordinary?’ he asked.

She tipped her head to the side. ‘It’s difficult to say. Despite the subject matter, it isn’t a very typical design for a church.’

She pulled a sheaf of photographs out of her bag and held them up so she could compare them against the window. They were images of various paintings and sketches of the supposed artist’s other lost windows. ‘It’s similar to Crowbridge’s earlier work, which was heavily influenced by the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.’

He nodded. ‘This window certainly has a touch of that style.’

Faith’s brows rose a notch and she swivelled her eyes to look at him. ‘You know something about art?’ What a relief to find he knew about something other than ordering people around, making them feel unwanted.

He gave her a derisive look.

She ignored it and cleared her throat. ‘But his work changed dramatically after the turn of the last century. This window isn’t anything like the paintings he was producing around the time this window was made.’

A lead weight settled inside her stomach. She hadn’t realised it, but she’d been dumb enough to let herself get excited about the window, to let herself hope. She turned away from it, wanting to block the image out for a second.

She should have been smarter than to get sucked in to the fantasy like that. But it was this place…Hadsborough was a like a fairytale on steroids. It was hard not to fall into that trap. She would just have to do better in the future.

‘I can see how an amateur might have made the error,’ she said, looking Marcus in the eye, ‘but I don’t think Samuel Crowbridge made this window.’

‘You know your subject, Miss McKinnon.’

‘Nice of you to notice,’ she replied. Really, the nerve of the man. She didn’t need his validation. ‘And it’s Faith.’

He blinked slowly, as if he’d registered her request and would think it over. Faith didn’t usually have a short fuse, but something about this man, his superior attitude, just drove her nuts.

‘Any sign of this message my grandfather mentioned?’