Aubrey blinked back the emotion that filled her eyes and lifted the bowl. “Great. Now who wants salad?”
*
Thirty-six hours later,Emma exited a taxi at the front entrance to the Montrose estate, a grand old mansion covered on one wall with ivy and moss. The drive from Glasgow had been long and exhausting after a very long flight from the West Coast. But worth it, she decided, staring at the sweeping gravel-lined driveway that led to the home. The stone crunched under the wheels of the taxi as it drove away, leaving her standing alone in the courtyard of the three-hundred-year-old mansion beside her suitcase.
Built around a courtyard complete with a turret with a Scottish flag waving overhead, the restoration-style estate was built completely of finely cut fieldstone and looked as much a part of the local landscape as the wild heather carpeting the moors above it. Wind-carved trees edged the property that sat near the ocean cliffs, and a formal garden that looked not nearly as grand as it must once have been filled the center of the courtyard.
Emma closed her eyes, imagining Connor walking here as a boy and as a young man with Violet, who’d met him here on this very spot. A deep sense of déjà vu washed over her. This was not only the house she’d seen from the hillside with Connor in the in-between but it was the place Violet had known centuries earlier, the place where she’d fallen in love with the same man Emma had.
She hadn’t believed any of that to be possible before her accident. But so much of who she’d once been was different now. If Gran were still here, she’d tell her about this place. All about the afterlife and the in-between and how she’d fallen in love with an angel. Gran would believe her, even if no one else did.
“Emma James?”
The woman’s voice came from behind her, and Emma turned to find a tall, aristocratic woman standing in the massive doorway. Her hair was flaming red, swept up into a messy bun. She looked to be nearly forty, with pale, porcelain skin and red lips. She reached a hand out to Emma as she approached. “Aileen McCormack. We spoke on the phone.”
Her brogue was thick, but not so thick that Emma didn’t understand her. Not so with the taxi driver who’d had to repeat himself several times when asking where she was heading. Emma took her hand with a smile. “Yes. I’m Emma.”
“Welcome to the Montrose House. Is that all ye came with?” she asked, indicating her small bag.
“Yes. I’m not here for long. I like to travel light these days.”
“Well, come in and I’ll show ye to your room. And then we can have a look ’round if ye’d like. There’s a lot to see here.”
“I’d like that.”
The house was grander inside than out, with wood paneling everywhere and huge oil paintings and portraits hanging on every wall. Three hundred years of history was on these walls. Most of the furniture looked like it had been here for nearly as long. Everything looked fresh, though, renovated for modern times, and there was a warm fire burning in the enormous fireplace in the main hall.
“It’s lovely,” she said as Aileen walked her up the curved staircase to the second floor. “I’m not sure what I expected.”
“Most of what ye see here has been preserved over the centuries and well looked after. Of course, we’ve made improvements, like electrical and heating, but except for the more modern furniture in the library, where lounging is encouraged, most of the furniture is period accurate and some has been with the estate for at least two hundred years. This estate was actually the second family home of the first duke of Montrose, the first residence bein’ in Glasgow, but much of their time was spent right here even as the duke was away on business.”
The second home? Emma shook her head, unable to wrap her mind around that kind of wealth. Her room was at the top of the stairs, a huge room with brocaded wallpaper in shades of burgundy. A four-poster cherry wood bed sat against one wall opposite the fireplace that already had a fire crackling in it.
“This is our off-season,” Aileen explained. “It’s a bridal suite usually, but no one’s using it now, so lucky you!”
“Gorgeous. Do you do many weddings here?”
“All the time. It’s verra romantic, don’t you agree? We’re generally booked up during summers, but o’ course that’s when the heather’s bloomin’ up the hill. Makes for beautiful wedding photos.”
Emma looked out the window. It overlooked the ocean, not the hillside, and the sea looked gray and unsettled today. “You must love working in a place like this.”
“Aye, I work here, but my husband and I, we actually own it.”
“Oh, I didn’t realize the estate had left the family.”
“Och,” she said, straightening out a wrinkle of the duvet cover on the bed. “It didna.”
“But your name is McCormick—?”
“That’s my husband’s name. No, my father was a Montrose in a long line of ’em, and I’m the only child. So, here we are.”
Emma blinked. She was standing here talking with a direct relative of Connor’s. But how? Who in that family had ended up having children?
Aileen fussed with a curtain, opening it a little wider. “Like many estates such as ours, we’ve had our struggles since the early part of the last century to keep up with this old place. Times bein’ what they are, many are selling off the old estates to big business only to be torn down and replaced with modern buildings and even corporate business parks, if ye can believe it. But we couldn’t see our way clear to do that to this old dame. She’s dear to us. And dear to the history of our family.”
They toured the house together, and Aileen showed her the many rooms of the once grand family. The music room, complete with a grand piano, and the parlor. A nursery that was still in use for guests. The kitchen was modernized, fit for a chef, but a piece of it had been left as it was, looking more like a scene fromDownton Abbeythan the rest of the kitchen. “So many wonder what it was like, d’ye ken?” Aileen said.
Above the fireplace in the library was a portrait that stopped Emma in her tracks. She made a sound. Not quite a gasp, but then again perhaps it was.
